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Syamsu  Suspended Member (Idle past 5620 days) Posts: 1914 From: amsterdam Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Violent propaganda | |||||||||||||||||||||||
IANAT Inactive Member |
Iraq didn't attack the US. Osama bin Laden did, remember? Saddam was thumbing his nose at America.Osama hit the nose and then was thumbing his nose at America. This was bringing a increasing support to stand-up against America. This affects your pride, commerce as well as eventual safety. So what are you going to do? If the child disobeys the parent, does the parent maintain control or let the child do as it pleases? America likes to be in control. What country would not? Power brings great benefits to its people. It does not take a war to reap benefits.
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crashfrog Member (Idle past 1497 days) Posts: 19762 From: Silver Spring, MD Joined: |
Saddam was thumbing his nose at America. In what way?
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Well, you are partially right. American intelligence was not really wrong about much of the Iraq information; Bush and Cheney and the rest just chose to ignore what many people were telling them.
quote: It's possible, but not probable. That's because there never was a convincing case for Iraq having WMD in the first place. Bush and Co. Just saw what they wanted to see and ignored the rest.
quote: Maybe, except that IRaq was still under pretty severe UN sanctions regarding any kind of military build up and was being well-monitored by the international weapons inspectors. Given Hussein's record, I don't think the international community would have readily allowed him to make any moves toward militarisation at all.
quote: Agreed, although remember that sometimes the manifestation of power boild down to "My religion tells me that I should kill you because you are not part of my group."
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: How so?
quote: ...and had been for quite some time. Bush and Co. dropped the ball and did not protect the country from this religious extremist. They had courted the Taliban, the most oppressive and brutal government in recent times. If we had finished the job in Afghanistan instead of going after a country which had never attacked us, things would be much better.
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Syamsu  Suspended Member (Idle past 5620 days) Posts: 1914 From: amsterdam Joined: |
Because the members of the axis of evil were getting overconfident in the wake of the successfull terrorist attack.
regards,Mohammad Nor Syamsu
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
In what way?
What significant changes in Iraqi policy followed on from September the 11th and demonstrate this overconfidence? TTFN, WK
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jar Member (Idle past 424 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined: |
The problem is that the real Evil Nation in the Terrorist Camp is Indonesia. If you examine what has come to light since 9-11 the recurring theme is that Indonesia was the meeting ground and home base for all of the various terrorist elements. Instead of invading IRAQ which has not been shown to have played any part in Terrorism, we should have invaded Indonesia.
Aslan is not a Tame Lion
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Why should I bother? I am already a civilian, and therefore a target. You may be amused to know that in the recent PCGamer review of America's Army, they captioned a picture of 4 guys covering different directions as "the Women & Children formation, in which you spray bullets wildly into crowds of civilians".
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Nonsense. There was nothing gained by attacking Afghanistan; it was merely the first bit of Imperialism that the administration knew it would get rubber-stamped.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: The Taliban was supporting the terrorist that attacked us, and he was in Afghanistan. We were quite justified in going after the Taliban and Bin Laden. Of course, my point was that we had no justification at all in going after Hussein and Iraq, and it was a diversion of needed resoources that could have been used effectively elsewhere.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: - according to intelligence - the same intelligence that reported WMD in Iraq.- Even if he was there, Afghanistan was still a soveriegn state - By your admission, your beef was not with the Taliban, but AQ (if it exists). quote: There was no justification for "going after the Taliban". The Taliban were doing their own thing in their own country and did not pose a threat to you; they had no effective army and minimal weaponry.
quote: And my point is, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is ALSO a crime and one for which the USA will be held accountable.
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
The Taliban was supporting the terrorist that attacked us, and he was in Afghanistan. quote: No, that's not correct. Our intelligence never provided evidence of WMD in Iraq. Bush and Co. just lied about it being there.
quote: The Taliban, which was the current religious dictatorship leading Afghanistan at the time, was funding and harboring and sheltering Al Qaida and Bin Laden. After 9/11 and before invading, the US demanded that the Taliban turn Bin Laden over, and they refused. Therefore, we invaded.
We were quite justified in going after the Taliban and Bin Laden. quote: The taliban was harboring a known terrorist responsible for the WTC attacks, and they refused to turn him over. They were hardly "doing their own thing". They made a choice to ally themselves with Al Qaida and Bin Laden against the US both before and after Bin Laden bombed the WTC, so they paid the consequences.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: I'm afraid that IS correct. Remember, Clinton was on this bandwagon too - that is why he authorised the Desert Fox campaign, and December 16th 1998 he said:
quote: What Bush did was to substantially underplay the tentativity of the intelligence. But as the subsequent reports on US intelligence show, there was a manifest willingness to accept the worst case scenario as most probable, and that they heard what they expected, or wanted, to hear. The blame cannot be laid purely at Bush's door, or that of the Republicans. The whole American establishment has read the situation incorrectly in almost every detail. It is not even clear that Al Qaida even exist in any objective sense, or whether US intelligence "deduced" the existance of AQ from first principles.
quote: The Taliban can only be said to be "funding and sheltering" Bin Laden and Al Qaida if AQ actually exists in a meaningful sense. And no evidence has ever emerged from Afghanistan making this conclusive case. American intelligence alleged these "facts" - but they also alleged, and Rumsfeld presented this on TV, that AQ had vast underground concrete bunkers in the mountains - none of which have ever been found. To date, almost no claims about AQ have ever been verified. The few identifiable AQ activities we are certain of all postdate 9/11 by some way. It is not clear that the demand to the Taliban was therefore reasonable or achievable. Furthermore, what right does the US have to go around unilaterally demanding that citizens of other states be handed over to you merely becuase you demand it? It is outright bullying, and the threat was followed up by actual violence. Please remember that ALL American citizens are protected from prosecution by other states even if they commit war crimes. Why do you hold the Taliban to a standard you yourselves do not honour?
quote: Well that bit is indisputable. Its also why you are in the wrong.
quote: And once again we see here the self-righteousness of declaring the violence of your enemies illegitimate. Americas support of Israel and its persecution of Palestinians is the real issue, and America paid the price for its cruelty on 9/11. This message has been edited by contracycle, 04-19-2005 05:21 AM
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nator Member (Idle past 2200 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: Look, you keep switching back and forth between Iraq and Al Qaida in the same breath. They are very different situations, and the fact that you keep switching like that leads me to believe that you have them conflated in your mind for some reason. Anyway, Clinton's bombing of Iraq in 1998 was in direct response to Iraq's giving lots of difficulty to the UNSCOM international weapons inspectors, including attacking helicopter pilots when they tried to fly the inspection teams to planned destinations, attacking photographers with the inspectors when they tried to take pictures of a site, etc. Around this time, evidence of Iraq's WMD plans and actual acivity were uncovered by coalition weapons inspectors:
September 25, 1997 * UNSCOM inspects an Iraqi "food laboratory". One of the inspectors, Dr. Diane Seaman, enters the building through the back door and catches several men running out with suitcases. The suitcases contained log books for the creation of illegal bacteria and chemicals. The letterhead comes from the president's office and from the Special Security Office (SSO). * UNSCOM attempts to inspect the SSO headquarters but is blocked. October 23, 1997 * The UN Security Council passes a resolution demanding once again that Iraq cooperate with UNSCOM inspectors. October, 1997 * UNSCOM destroys large quantities of illegal chemical weapons and related equipment. Iraq admitted that some of this equipment had been used to produce VX gas in May, 1997. Here's my info on the Pre Desert Fox timeline As you can read, this is REAL PHYSICAL EVIDENCE that Iraq was producing illegal chemical weapons, because it had to be destroyed. Overall, the timeline shows that Iraq was basicaly jerking the inspectors around. Also note that I do NOT think that Iraq had WMD when Bush invaded. Desert Fox was a completely different mission than Desert Storm. OK, now on to Al Qaida.
quote: Sure it does, but it is not terribly clear cut who is an "Al Qaida member" or not because it is a shadowy, secretive, covert terrorist organization. There are probably many sub-groups that Bin Laden and other leaders can call upon. Anyway, pretty much the entire international community recognizes that Al Qaida exists, so I'm not sure why I should believe you when you say it doesn't. Here's my info:
Al Qaida has an entry in Wikipedia, so it must exist quote: Uh, Bin Laden has been identifying himself (and his group) as being responsible for many attacks and bombings on US targets, including 9/11. Do you deny what he says?
quote: Did they offer to help find bin Laden and to bring him to justice? Anyway, it had been very well known that bin laden had been conducting terrorist training camps in Afghanistan for years before that.
quote: It wasn't unilateral. The UN and much of the international community demanded it also:
United Nations Orders Taliban: Hand Over Bin Laden This message has been edited by schrafinator, 04-19-2005 08:32 AM
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Inasmuch as they are both pretexts for American Imperial expansion the Middle East, yes.
quote: I'm well aware of the allegations. That said, I consider some of them spurious - one is that a group of guards refused to let them into an HQ; that could be simply cockup rather than conspiracy. You will need to more specific about alleged attacks on inspectors - I don't recall any such. And clearly, no such WMD plans or programmes were in fact uncovered: because as we now know, they were clean since 1991. This is exactly the 'seeing what you want to see' I suggested. Everyone "knowns" that Iraq has WMD, therefore anything suspicious "must" be indicative of an attempt to conceal. Nevertheless, the point remains that you simply cannot lay the Iraq debacle on Bush's door alone. Bush did and Clinton were both willing to kill and maim on the basis of their dodgy intelligence reports alone. Clinton, and his Democratic administration, were every bit as convinced that Saddam was armed to the teeth as Bush was. Bush exagerated; he understated the partial data; for these he can and should be held to account. And so should Bomber Bill. And before you ask, yes I was out on the streets protesting against Desert Fox. You may be pleased to learn that American pilots managed to bomb a flock of sheep, so that only bits of said sheep and their shephard could be found. Of course, nobody was held responsible.
quote: Thats the allegation that has now been comprehensively disproven. You will remember that Scott Ritter testified that "we got it almost entirely wrong", and as I recall he ran USNCOM during this period. This is also the period in which UNSCOM inspectors were revealed to be US intelligence agents, in total violation of the agreed tersm of the inspection. Once again, these alleged products that justified Desert Fox have never been found.
quote: Riiiiight. Is that because you supported 'Fox, huh? There was no evidence - there were merely allegations, since disproved.
quote: The problem is, the rest of the world does not haver access to US intelligence sources, and cannot verify US claims. And that is all we have to go on. I never said that AQ certainly did not exist. I say, IF it exists. But the real problem is that it is not clear if AQ EVER existed in any meaningful sense until the US invented it. As the Wikipedia link reports:
quote: Bin Laden certainly had contacts. He probably had intent. But he probably never had an actual organisation that existed in conspiratorial cells, being organised by an international terrorist master-mind. But now that the US is so insistent there is such an organ, the name has certainly acquired a currency and cachet it never had before. The US is fighting demons largely of its own creation, and own invention.
quote: As you well know, many rival organisations are proine to claiming reponsibility for any given act of resistance. And if AQ is indeed the paranoid figment of US imagination, then it might even be easy to claim the strike on behalf of AQ as a means of putting the US off the scent. Frankly, AQ does not behave like any other terrorist organisation anyone has ever heard of. It behaves like a James Bond villain. This alone is reason to doubt is actual existance as a meaningful entity - a threat deduced from nothing more than a single list in the posession of one individual. Seeing what you want to see again, especially as the predictions of huge bunkers in Afghanistan - the cited reason for the invasion - are now utterly discredited.
quote: Why should they, when Bin Laden was administering justice? But yes, the Taliban did publicly say they would hand Bin Laden over if they knew where he was. There are some suggestions they were lying about that, and did know where he was, but lets bear in mind: the Taliban have absolutely no responsibility whatsoever to the USA. When, for example, will you be handing your killers and torturers over to the Iraqi judicial system?
quote: No its not well known - its violently disputed not least by the very people who wqere arrested by the US in those very camps. They repeatedly report that the camps exiosted for training militia and mujahadeen for work in the India-Pakistan border, for theongoing Palestinian conflict and indeed for anti-Westerrn strikes. But it is quite clear that Bin Laden did not "run" any of these camps - they were run by the likes of Hizbollah and related organs and sympathisers. And these are the people that the US has been obliged to release back to the UK without charge. There are undoubtedly more innocent victims presently languishing in American gulags. By the way, the Kurds run similar camps for their expats too. And I have known several British Pakistanis who have attended training camps in Pakistan learning to use AK's and RPG's. But you know the real reason they go? Charity donations by paying for that service in Western currency; they have no intention of taking up the struggle thmeselves. Thus the point is the whole region is rife with armed "terrorist" camps, by which, once again, the term terrorist merely means "army without uniforms". There is absolutely no way the simple coincidence of Bin Laden at such a camp indicates he was ever in charge. He may have been the afternoon guest preacher.
quote: Yes thats true. Unfortunately, we are fools to support America in this regard ever, becuase it will be thrown back in our faces: the US still will never sign up to the conventions governing war crimes which would allow its citizens to be extradited to face justice. What this incident is a demonstration of is only the silly sympathy the world felt for the US after 9/11, and the fact that appeasement of US imperialism does not work. This message has been edited by contracycle, 04-19-2005 10:26 AM
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