State of the Union Address

[Bandalero]

it makes fer good olde fashon readin.

[Corey]

ok, i admit i fucked up once. always question the source, i suppose.

but since i've been wrong about 1 time in this discussion, and you've been wrong, or at the very least unable to answer or account for things, about 50 times, i'd be careful about being so fucking cocky.

don't run your mouth with me, skippy. you don't know shit.

well at least 2 times.. you know.. the whole C4/TATP thing.....

[Venom]

don't run your mouth with me, skippy. you don't know shit.

LOL Seems to me you're the one that "don't know shit.....skippy"

[starvingeyes]

corey.

"High Explosives--Pre-Blast

Do not need confinement; detonate; initiated by shock of detonator
Exception: blasting agents; booster needed for detonation
Types: commercial dynamite, binary (such as kinepak), improvised (tatp, hmtd), military (TNT, FLEX-X, C4)
Insensitive to heat, shock, impact and friction; can be used underwater; most brisant "

from YOUR source. read again where C4 and TATP are both categorized as high explosives--pre-blast. they are not the same bomb. they do not have the same make up. they are totally different compounds. that's why one is called C4 and the other is called TATP.

you see corey, there is only one type of explosive compound called C4. there are different compounds made of the same material, but they all have different names, such as C3, which is a weaker version of the same thing. when the FBI says C4 in nature, they can only be referring to C4. C4 is not an ingredient. it is a finished product. they don't put "C4" in other bombs, they put RDX in C4, among other things. do TATP and C4 both contain RDX? probably, i don't know. however, if the FBI believed the bomb was an RDX based compound, they would've said "RDX in nature" not "C4".

[starvingeyes]

venom i'll be embarassing you later tonight, starting with your incredible claim that the 6 day war was not started by israel.

[Venom]

Egypt started the Six day War by closing off the Atrait of Tiran which was the lifeline of Israeli trade with the rest of the world. THAT was an act of war. Also amassing millions of troops in the Sinai, as well as the Israeli/Jordan border. Israel knew an attack was coming. It was obvious. They did strike first yes, but Egypt started the war and if Israel didn't strike Egypt, Jordan, and Syria would have in the following days.

[mosaik]

regarding saddam & religon:

saddam is an atheist, but also a politician. in order to shore up support for his regime in all parts of iraq, he has allowed islamic fundamentalism to grow, but he's not a muslim. he's a military man, who is now attempting to become the nations religious leader.

i haven't read anything that says "saddam isn't a muslim" or "saddam is a muslim" but i have read about the muslims he ordered killed. gives me some insight, i think.

lately he's switiched to using religous rhetoric to strenghten his cause and the feelings of anti-amerikanism.

http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/09/02/iraq.hussein/

in that article he sounds like a genius. he's right. this does concern all honest men.

regarind the oft mentioned firing upon of amerikan & british fighters - this happened AFTER said fighters had rounded up a four day bombing binge, remember? what was he supposed to do, just let them keep blowing him up?

the man was right to fire back. i sure would.

[Venom]

regarind the oft mentioned firing upon of amerikan & british fighters - this happened AFTER said fighters had rounded up a four day bombing binge, remember? what was he supposed to do, just let them keep blowing him up?

Wrong again. The US and UK ONLY bomb when their aircraft are fired upon. Its the fundamental rule of engagement in case you didn't know. When they are fired on yes the blow up radar, AA installations, and other hostile facilities. If you believe what you wrote get me some proof that we just bomb for the hell of it all the time. I'll find 100 articles and documents that prove otherwise.

[Venom]

again to prove you wrong on Saddam:

It all started in 1991, during the Gulf War, when President Saddam Hussein added the words "Allahu Akbar", Arabic for "God is great", to the Iraqi flag and promised he would liberate Jerusalem, a holy site for Muslims.

A few years later, the Iraqi leader, a Sunni Muslim, launched what is called the "Faith Campaign", making the studying of the Koran compulsory in schools across Iraq. In 1996, alcohol was banned in restaurants.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1950517.stm

^thats the whole article. I have tons more. want them? Get a clue Doug.

[mosaik]

why do you have to resort to flaming, and marking up your posts with childish assertions like "wrong again" and "get a clue"? i haven't said anything like that to you. If you think i'm so clueless and i don't know anything, why do you both debating with me? clearly i've got my head up my ass, right? it's not like i've said anything that even remotely resembles truth, right?

once again, to quote Michael Shermer:

"But as soon as a group sets itself up to be the final moral arbiter of other people's actions, especially when its members believe they have discovered absolute standards of right and wrong, it is the beginning of the end of tolerance and thus, reason and rationality. It is this characteristic more than any other that makes a cult, a religion, a nation, or any other group, dangerous to individual freedom. "

this is what you are doing. you refuse to be objective, to remove emotion from this discussion and to debate rationally. if you can't do that then i'm not going to bother. i don't come here to be flamed by the likes of you.

that same quote applies to most amerikans. your country acts as that "final moral arbiter" and therefore, amerika is a danger to freedom as well. on to your post.

Saddam would blow up allah if he thought it was going to further his cause. the man has killed muslims, he's been a muslim, he's "liberated" islamic sites of worship & he's burned them down. he is not anti-amerikan because of some holy war.

"In 1998 he averted conflicts in February and again in November by agreeing to allow inspections to continue. However, when in December he again blocked inspections, the United States and Britain launched a four-day series of air strikes on Iraqi military and industrial targets."

after that 4 day bombing binge;

"Hussein declared that Iraq would allow no further UN inspections and threatened to fire on foreign aircraft patrolling over northern and southern Iraq."

threatened. then, after he did fire on the aircraft, amerikan & uk fighters attacked again.

he did not start shooting.

[Venom]

Well tell me what right he had to block inspectors?? He agreed to let them in. If he is so innocent and isn't hiding anything whats the problem? The problem is that he has these weapons and will do anything to keep them. He needs to be dealt with and the US and the rest of the world (except maybe the Germans, Chinese) will deal with him. The French will give in because they always do. They are only against it because of all the money they have invested. Same goes for the Russians. They will both come along though because they know if they don't they'll lose a lot more.

[mosaik]

what right did he have? it's his country! iraq is not a satellite state of the united states. the president of the us does not get to dictate policy to saddam.

i'd be pissed too if some dumb hick kept telling me over and over he wasn't satisfied with the inspections! the reason the un inspectors keep going back is because there is nothing there and bush/clintion/who-fucking-ever won't be satisfied until they find bombs!

whose business is it if he is armed? he appears to be less likely to use them then the good ole us of a.

[Venom]

what right did he have? it's his country! iraq is not a satellite state of the united states. the president of the us does not get to dictate policy to saddam.

Why do you keep saying US when it comes to inspections. That was the UN that put the resolutions in place and put the inspectors in Iraq, not just the US. The UN is supposed to be a body that prevents countries and their leaders from committing horrible acts. Do you remember the reason all this came about. Its because of Iraq's use of chemical and biological weapons on Iran and its own people AS WELL AS Iraq invading Kuwait FOR NO REASON!!! He brought this all on himself. The US didn't make him kill thousands with those weapons or attack his neighbors.

[starvingeyes]

the israelis also deliberately bombed a us naval ship and killed 23 men on board, including 2 NSA operators during the 6 day war as well.

some 4000 innocent arabic people were killed in addition to the aforementioned us ships.

when saddam invaded kuwait he thought he had american permission to do so. brush up on your history and you'll discover that bush I was very friendly with saddam right up to the gulf war. that's where hussein got all of his weapons from. remember all the friendly fire deaths in the first gulf war because the iraqui military was wearing us uniforms?

The US didn't make him kill thousands with those weapons or attack his neighbors

so it's not ok when saddam kills thousands but it is ok when the us/un does it? [ sanctions on iraq have lead to millions of deaths, not to mention the 3000 innocent people killed in afghanistan. ]

[starvingeyes]

read this

From http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31PELL.html

A War Crime or an Act of War?
By STEPHEN C. PELLETIERE

ECHANICSBURG, Pa. — It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."

The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.

But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story.

I am in a position to know because, as the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and as a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, I was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf. In addition, I headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States; the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

This much about the gassing at Halabja we undoubtedly know: it came about in the course of a battle between Iraqis and Iranians. Iraq used chemical weapons to try to kill Iranians who had seized the town, which is in northern Iraq not far from the Iranian border. The Kurdish civilians who died had the misfortune to be caught up in that exchange. But they were not Iraq's main target.

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned. A much-discussed article in The New Yorker last March did not make reference to the Defense Intelligence Agency report or consider that Iranian gas might have killed the Kurds. On the rare occasions the report is brought up, there is usually speculation, with no proof, that it was skewed out of American political favoritism toward Iraq in its war against Iran.

I am not trying to rehabilitate the character of Saddam Hussein. He has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.

In fact, those who really feel that the disaster at Halabja has bearing on today might want to consider a different question: Why was Iran so keen on taking the town? A closer look may shed light on America's impetus to invade Iraq.

We are constantly reminded that Iraq has perhaps the world's largest reserves of oil. But in a regional and perhaps even geopolitical sense, it may be more important that Iraq has the most extensive river system in the Middle East. In addition to the Tigris and Euphrates, there are the Greater Zab and Lesser Zab rivers in the north of the country. Iraq was covered with irrigation works by the sixth century A.D., and was a granary for the region.

Before the Persian Gulf war, Iraq had built an impressive system of dams and river control projects, the largest being the Darbandikhan dam in the Kurdish area. And it was this dam the Iranians were aiming to take control of when they seized Halabja. In the 1990's there was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and, by extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change.

Thus America could alter the destiny of the Middle East in a way that probably could not be challenged for decades — not solely by controlling Iraq's oil, but by controlling its water. Even if America didn't occupy the country, once Mr. Hussein's Baath Party is driven from power, many lucrative opportunities would open up for American companies.

All that is needed to get us into war is one clear reason for acting, one that would be generally persuasive. But efforts to link the Iraqis directly to Osama bin Laden have proved inconclusive. Assertions that Iraq threatens its neighbors have also failed to create much resolve; in its present debilitated condition — thanks to United Nations sanctions — Iraq's conventional forces threaten no one.

Perhaps the strongest argument left for taking us to war quickly is that Saddam Hussein has committed human rights atrocities against his people. And the most dramatic case are the accusations about Halabja.

Before we go to war over Halabja, the administration owes the American people the full facts. And if it has other examples of Saddam Hussein gassing Kurds, it must show that they were not pro-Iranian Kurdish guerrillas who died fighting alongside Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Until Washington gives us proof of Saddam Hussein's supposed atrocities, why are we picking on Iraq on human rights grounds, particularly when there are so many other repressive regimes Washington supports?

source: the new york times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31PELL.html

enjoy.

[starvingeyes]

fighting terrorism in israel.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/TheTr ... /frame.htm

[Joey]

woah .. Doug .. cool avatar .. freaky but cool

[Venom]

You really like to twist things around don't you. The facts are that that is not the only instance of mass murder of Kurds by Saddam. In 1975 (before the Iraq/Iran war) Saddam slaughtered thousands of Kurds on the Turkey border, and he gassed thoudsands of Kurds AFTER the Iraq/Iran war was over!! You also stated that Saddam thought he could attack Kuwait?? What the US said was that it wouldn't take sides in conflicts between the countries they never said that Iraq could invade countries without a reason. Theres a bit of a difference there don't ya think?

[Venom]

I'm not even gonna respond to that slideshow. Thats Palestinian propaganda. I thought you'd know better than that.

[starvingeyes]

palestinian propaganda?

those are pictures taken by independent photographers and sent to a US newsletter.

that you deny the massacre at jenin is frankly shocking. you are truly a victim of disinformation.