What did you do to remember 9/11?

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WOW - Shralp involved in America-bashing! I never thought I'd see the day.

 

Hmmm.... On a bit morbid note, uit seems that the SuoLi mailing list, the one for the Finnish LARP association, died as well on 11/9, seein as after the date only posts have been about the deadness of the list.

Ara
(Life sucks and then you die)

 

Scarampella,

You posted:

This was three posts after my comments about Clinton. No one up to that point even brought him up. Perhaps accuse was to strong a term, but it was clear you were referring to me.

I'm not sure why being a liberal has anything to do with this. Just because you are a liberal does not mean that you have to follow the Democratic party to the grave. Try to be objective about Clintons performance.
It seems that you are saying that because of his behavior in the 60's, the military would not have carried out his orders. They sure carried them out when he told them to fire cruise missles. Why would they have not followed through with other types of military action?

Your comments about the public reaction to Somalia are curious. But I don't understand what you are trying to say.

For the record, I align myself with neither party (I'm an independent). I hate the general policies of the Republicans when it comes to the environment. I hate the general policies of the Democrats when it comes to social engineering (welfare, affirmative action, gun control, etc.). Both parties play the partisan politics thing to the detriment of the entire country.

[ September 25, 2002, 15:57: Message edited by: Jack Funk ]

 

Jack:
OK, maybe I was making an assumption based upon your statement. But I will say it again, I wanted to reply to the comment which is one many people on the right would make. I mean, how far of a stretch is it really to respond to a Clinton bash as something typically partisan?

For someone who is disturbed by assumtions you make quite a few.
I am liberal but I will not "follow the party to its grave". I happen to be very dissapointed with my party, and have been for decades. Don't assume I am incapable of looking objectively at Clinton.

You tend towards black and white thinking which makes trying to communicate difficult. If you can't see how the media and public sentiment affected Clinton's use of the military, I'm afraid explaining myself further will be to no avail.

 

I understand that the media and public affected Clintons use of the military. The media and public affected practically everything that Clinton did when he was in office. That's the problem. Clinton was privy to knowledge that the media and public did not have. He could/should have acted on that knowledge.
According to Dick Morris (Clintons chief political advisor) in his book "Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All Odds", the polls indicated that terrorism was not high on the list of concerns of the average American. So despite having knowledge that the public was not aware of, Clinton chose to do nothing about it.
As far as I am concerned, Clinton failed in his job as Commander and Chief (the primary job of the President). You don't make military decisions based on popular sentiment. You base them on threat assessment, intelligence, military readiness, troop strength, etc.

I apologize for any assumptions that I made about you. If you review your posts, it is easy (for me anyway) to see how I came to the conclusion that you were a party-line Democrat. Your last post clears that up. I will try to not make any assumptions in the future.

[ September 25, 2002, 23:02: Message edited by: Jack Funk ]

 

I did nothing special to remember 9/11 (note that we europeans have adapted the american way of writing dates in the wrong order, if I should be correct it should be written 11/9).
But I did give it some thought and what concluded was that western lives are alot more valuable than people that live in other parts of the world, atleast in our minds. We all agree that it was a terrible thing and that the individuals should be hunted down and put to trial (not put in a koncentration camp on Cuba with no legal council and no rights whatsoever, not prisoners of war nor captured criminals but humans that have been bereft of all their rights. Not even the most ruthless criminal get such a treatment, heck not even the nazis got it and the only crime the people in Guantamo Bay is guilty of is having an opionion of something that most of here disagree with and that they fought in a war on the wrong side. Reminds me how Hitler and Stalin treated their prisoners of war. None of them flew a plan, I doubt it if anyone of them even knew about it, they were naught but products of a horrid society, brainwashed and without no hope at all. Is that how the US treat their POW's? Or is it not a war? I am confused here? When is someone a prisoner of war,a criminal or someone to just be put in a koncentration camp?)

On the iraque matter so is the only reason to attack Iraq paranoia and imo a way for Bush to fire up the masses with another holy crusade. Saddam is a dictator and a genocide, he should have been removed a long time ago, prefarably when they had the chance during W's dad. But the US kept him, ni my opinion was it because he was needed, the US needed a ghost to scare their populace and justify their huge military budget and to keep the wheels in the arms industry rolling, but that is my personal opinion. But today there is no reason to attack Iraq, he isnt athreat to the US atleast, he have nothing at all in common with Bin Laden and the Al Qaida, Saddam is a secular leader and not at all liked but the religous fantatics that the Al Qaida rely on, I think they would just as gladly kill each other as attack the US, same with Iraq and Iran. Saddam doesnt have more weapons now than what he had a few years ago, all reports stating that he has bio and chem weapons are old and suspicouns. And what if he has them? He cannot use them, he is already a paria. Attacking Iraq would only serve to gather the nation behind him just aas the sanctions have, after teh guld war there was a big opposition ready to dispose him if they got the proper support from abroad, they didnt. Instead the world showed the iraqi that we care nothing for them with sanctions and now threats fo a new war, who can they turn to? The answer is Saddam Hussein...
The US with their great experience of disposing unwanted goverments should work for an internal solution to the Iraq problem instead of bombing a piece of desert to smithereens because you dont think the US dare to go in with troops and risk a single valuable american life when they can let their planes rain inscrutiable destruction from the skies?

 

Hey you guys know the real solution to all these world problems? Listen to "Imagine" from John Lennon. Now theirs a role model for peace.

 

Totaly agree with Joq.

 

I'm glad we have reached a middle ground here.

" So despite having knowledge that the public was not aware of, Clinton chose to do nothing about it."

This is true, about many areas of conflict around the world. Clinton did much to try and create a world of discourse, unification and peace i.e. China, Russia, Israel and Arafat. In many ways he did not fulfill his desired end, but he brought us much closer to world peace than we might have expected. How our relations with China, Israel, and Europe have changed within such a short period of time since he left office. All that he built has been torn down within months. I am especially concerned about China.

Clinton wanted to focus upon internal issues. As 'democrat' as they may seem, welfare, healthcare, social security are issues we cannot deal with entirely as individuals as the Republicans would have us think. How many people can afford medicine that costs a minimum $2.00 a pill? How may people can count on their 401K's when crooked boards and CEO's are left to plunder stockholders without some kind of oversight?

When people are not able to afford insurance, every one else picks up the tab. We cannot go it alone and ignore what is happening. Maybe the gov't is not the answer; they seem to fail at many things they try to do. The FBI failed to handle the information they had readily available about Al Qaida and possible attacks upon the World Trade center. As far as I'm concerned, our system will fail if we do not balance out the wealth soon. God, it was only 25 yrs ago that we could have single income families. Now two incomes are hardly enough to survive. That is not right. Especially since many families are single parents.

Maybe if Clinton had done something earlier we would not be where we are now, but my feeling is the public would not have supported any action on his part. OBL would have seen this lack of public support as a weakness and would have continued his attacks. Basically, the public needed some kind of first hand evidence closer to home to respond with any kind of fervor. No one put flags on their cars after the USS Cole.

 

i've thanks uncle bin

 

Kovsky, that is NOT funny

holy crusade, hmm? What on Earth are you talking about? Did Al-Qaeda kill thousands of Americans or not? Yes, they did. Was America's response self defense, and designed to prevent AQ from attacking it again? Yes, it was. So explain to me how that qualifies as a holy crusade. The American people didn't need political BS to hate OBL: like Hitler, his actions took care of that.

right. So he obstructed the inspectors and prevented them from doing their job for no reason at all-just because he enjoys being contrary. Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Are you willing to bet your life on that? I'm not. You miss the point: we aren't as worried that HE will use them as we are that he'll give them to someone else who will. He's been a pariah for over a decade, and hasn't bothered him yet.

 

i am sorry SlimShogun i didn`t know what the name was... of course i didn`t mean white i ment Aryan...

and USA just startes wars to make more taxes that just goes to the presidents pockets...

 

What I have done? When I drove past our FireDepartement, and noticed the flag half-mast, I stopped, and stood there for a moment. A moment in which I reflected on the past year, and what has changed.

My conclusion? Not all that much has changed. Mankind is still FUBAR.

 

AMaster you didnt answer to a single thing I said. On the holy crusade I meant that the basicly that the much of the rhetorics used by the Bush admistration is very religous in its wording, 'with god by our side', 'god will protect us' and the whole good vs evil thing. The rhetorics sounds very similar to the their oppononts that claim to have a jihad, therefore I used the world crusade. The other reason for that sentence is that there is no collaboration at all between WTC and Al Qaida and Saddam and Iraq. Those things are not connected. You are mixing up the Afganistan war with the possible iraqi war and on a sidenote I do not think the afganiwar was selfdefence, it wasnt the nation Afghanistan that attacked you. But I can agree on it perhaps being nescessary.

On your second issue so have you completely misunderstood me, what I meant was that he has no more weapons now than what he had a few years ago, ie probably something but no one can be sure. But the info we have today is old. Nothing ground shaking has come up this last months to even more justify an attack on Iraq, the threat image is the same as it was several years ago. What I meant is that for some reason it is comfortable to attack now, even though nothing new has happened in several years. Why now? Why not 3 years ago if he is that terrible terrible dangerous?

On the third issue, are you willing to bet several thousands of lives that he will use them? On who will he use them? And I do know that we arent talking american or even western lives here if the UN decides to go along with it is the civilians, it is always the civilians. Why hasnt he used them before? Or given to them to someone? There is no proof that he has anything, according to one of the top inspectors all Saddam has is worthless goo. We do not know, we may suspect.

 

Not quite, joa.

We simply don't know what he's got now. There have been no inspections, remember? And we do know that he's bought equipment for enriching uranium and tried several times to get fissionable material on the black market. We also now know that there have been all kinds of construction at his nuclear facilites (in violation of UN regulations, if that matters to you).

Regardless, even if he has no more weapons now than he did three years ago, the difference is that now the world has woken up and has regained the will to act. All of these things (removal of the Taliban, reinstatement of inspections in Iraq, etc.) should have happened before. But we, quie frankly, didn't care to deal with it because of all the flack we'd have to take from that wonderful international community.

IMO, the UN handling of the weapons inspections proves that the organization is useless for its primary mission and is only capable of foisting unwanted birth control on third world countries and trying to redefine gender as one of five options.

Oh, and the chief weapons inspector you refer to is Scott Ritter, who was the most critical of the Iraqis because they wouldn't let him go anywhere to inspect. He finally declared that they should just pull out because they couldn't inspect the sites. Now he's suddenly claiming to be an authority on the state of Iraqi arms. How exactly does "I was once in Iraq but couldn't look at anything" qualify him to do so?

 

Joaquin this is long, forgive me,

(1) Why hasn't Saddam used weapons of mass destruction before? He really hasn't advanced his weaponry since the war? "From 1983 on there were credible reports that Iraqui forces were using them in the war with Iran. Then in 1988 there came clear confirmation that Iraqui government troops had unleashed chemical weapons on the town Halabja in Iraqui Kurdistan. At least 3,000 people were killed by Sarin gas in one incident. Some Gulf War veterans associations claim Iraq used chemical weapons during the 1991 Gulf War but this has never been conclusively prooved.

In the inspections programme, Iraq has acknowledged production of more than 200,000 chemical weapons.

UNSCOM itself has destroyed over 40,000 chemical weapons and nearly 500 tonnes of chemical warfare agents. This is an astonishing amount given that a couple of drops - or a few grams - of some of these agents is enough to kill.

The main facility for CW research and production was the Al-Muthanna State Establishment, but there were other plants in the Fallujah area, south-west of Baghdad.

There are still some gaps in the knowledge of Iraq's chemical warfare programme from the end of its war with Iran in August 1988 until the end of the Gulf War in 1991. It was during this period that Iraq tried to convert many of the short-range weapons it possessed into long-range strategic weapons.

For years, Iraq denied that it had any biological weapons programmes at all. Then, in 1995, it was forced by the defection of Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel to acknowledge that it had been developing germ warfare. But it still has not accounted for all of the 'growth media' it imported - meaning that it could retain both biological weapons and the means to produce more.

Iraq is known to have imported 38 tonnes of growth media for agents such as anthrax and botulimun in 1988 - when it was still preferred by industrialised countries to its radical Islamic neighbour Iran. Of this, 22 tonnes is estimated to have been used up in making weapons which have now been destroyed and UNSCOM destroyed another 11 tonnes in 1996. That leaves seven tonnes unaccounted for.

Along with the growth media, UNSCOM also destroyed Iraq's main known biological weapons factory at Hakam, 60 km south west of Baghdad in the desert. Iraq had originally claimed the facility - which stretched over 18 square kilometres and made an astonishing 600,000 litres of biological agents - was a plant to make animal feed.

Iraq is also known to have produced and put into weapons aflatoxin, which causes liver and kidney failure and cancer and genetic disorders leading to birth defects, and ricin, a toxin causing lung damage when inhaled.

"It is clear now according to our preliminary analysis all the growth culture, the complex growth culture have not been accounted for. We take it that there is at least a range of five tonnes, 5,000 kilos growth culture which has so far not been accounted for," Rolf Ekeus, UNSCOM head, said back in 1995. Although the agents themselves have been destroyed, the missing tools to produce them have not been found since.

During the 1980s, Iraq imported about 800 Scud missiles from the Soviet Union to use in its war with Iran. This started a phase of missile attacks on both sides known as the 'War of the Cities' in which Iraq began to build up a knowledge of using these long-range weapons in action.

In the late 1980s, Iraq began to try and develop its own long-range missiles in programmes with other Arab countries including Egypt. The Badr 2000 series of weapons were designed to have a range of about 1,000 km - far enough to carry into Israel from the western borders of Iraq - and to be capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Baghdad has continued to develop these weapons since the end of the Gulf War - even while under surveillance from the United Nations. In 1995, a shipment of gyroscope components used to make Scud missiles was intercepted on its way to Iraq. There was an earlier successful shipment in 1991.

Rolf Ekeus has told the U.N. Security Council UNSCOM is not confident of having tracked and destroyed all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

"In that respect, we are concerned that at least six such missiles, maybe up to fifteen, sixteen missiles still not accounted for. We cannot give reasonable assurances to the Security Council that we have accounted for all weapons in that respect," he said in 1996. Nothing has changed since.

The latest row over American participation in inspections is only one in a long series, as Iraq has tried to obstruct the mission since it began. Here's a brief list of past incidents:

September 1991

A team from the International Atomic Energy Agency was besieged in a car park for several days, after emerging from a suspected nuclear facility with documents.

July 1992

UNSCOM personnel tried to enter the Iraqi Ministry of Agriculture in Baghdad without warning for an inspection. They were blocked and so began a 24-hour observation of the building. They were forced to abandon it and leave the country after they were attacked by a series of mobs in the street outside.

July 1993

UNSCOM was prevented from installing monitoring cameras at two missile test stands at Al-Rafah and Yawm Al-Azim, about 60 km south and south-west of Baghdad. The Baghdad government eventually backed down under the threat of international military action.

June 1996

UNSCOM inspectors were denied access to a series of sites associated with the Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard, and which were believed to be involved in the concealment of proscribed weapons. Iraq denied the inspectors access to four out of six sites, saying they were 'presidential areas' and therefore beyond inspection. Despite numerous rounds of negotiations, inspectors were not able to enter most of these areas and Iraq was condemned as a result in August 1996 for gross violations of U.N. resolutions.

It can be estimated that Iraq would have had a capability to acquire couple of useable nuclear weapons well before 1995, had the Security Council not intervened with Resolution 687", Rolf Ekeus, head of UNSCOM, told the magazine Arms Control this year.

(2) Iraq is not tied to al-Qaida? From reporter Jeff Goldberg, who has been there: "There has been a certain amount of discussion this week in Washington about one particular point I raised, which concerns allegations that Saddam is more closely tied to al-Qaida than we had previously thought. I had actually gone to Iraqi Kurdistan in late January not expecting to learn anything new about terrorism (post-Sept. 11 terrorism, that is, not state terror against the Kurds). But when I was in Kurdistan, I started to hear stories about an al-Qaida-style terror group formerly known as the Jund al-Islam, or Soldiers of Islam, which recently changed its name (for the most naked of PR reasons, I believe) to the Ansar al-Islam, or Supporters of Islam. This group controls about 10 villages near the Iranian border, and its membership consists of typical Islamist mayhem-makers; these people kill in various nasty ways and want to impose sharia, Islamic law, on Free Kurdistan (the parts of Kurdistan under the American no-fly zone), which is problematic because the Kurds are, in the main, secular, progressive, and pro-American.

It's not much of a surprise that this group would be run by so-called Afghan Arabs—Arabs who cycled through Afghanistan over the past 20 years to fight against the Soviets or for Osama. But what I learned—and I'm not going to give away the whole story here—is that Saddam's intelligence agency may jointly control this group with al-Qaida. If this is true, well, the implications are quite serious, which is why people in Washington who don't want the United States to do anything about Iraq have been (unsuccessfully) trying to discredit this aspect of my article. I will tell you, in a later round, about a ridiculous attempt by CNN's Aaron Brown to shoot down the story.

Let me move quickly to another main point of the piece. In 1988, Saddam used, as you know, chemical weapons against the Kurds of the north. He killed thousands with these weapons (and killed thousands more with conventional tools), and today the survivors of these attacks are suffering in terrible ways. Despite the fact that the people of northern Iraq make up the largest single population of chemical-attack survivors in the world, our government has never bothered to study this population and its problems in a systematic way. This is obviously a humanitarian issue, but it is also a national security issue for the United States. The Kurdish doctors I spoke to thought we had lost our heads over the anthrax scare of last fall, in which a handful of people died. We obviously weren't ready for even a small-scale attack, so the question arises: Why hasn't our government ever bothered to explore the long-term medical implications of Saddam's chemical attacks on the Kurds?

I will end what could quickly devolve into a rant by posing this question to you: Does it in fact even matter if Saddam is connected to al-Qaida? In other words, why look for a smoking gun when a dozen already exist? This is a man who has attacked, unprovoked, four of his country's neighbors; a man who has committed genocide and used chemical weapons on civilians; a man who is clearly obsessed with the development of weapons of mass destruction; and a man who uses homicide and rape as a tool of governance. Isn't he worthy, by these deeds alone, of removal?

Or am I just naive?

Best,
Jeff"

 

I seem to have been slightly misunderstood, but that is to be expected as I am not all too clear most of the time. Basicly what I meant on the iraqi issue that there is not reason enough to go to war, not imo. But my opinion is based on how I perceive the world, just as yours are based on how you perceive it. My main gripe is that I find war to be truly horrible and I think it takes more than suspicouns about possible weapons to go to war, I do think that Saddam should be deposed but as I wrote in my post I think it should have been done a long time ago and by internal dissidents perhaps with western support.

I would just like to ask why no one have commented on my prison rant? The iraqi thing isnt new, what I say and what you say have been said before on these boards.

 

Mostly because no one gives a flying f!ck about the rights of people who were fighting for the Taliban.

(deep breaths... deep breaths... calm Shralp... go to your happy place)

Ok, so of course it would be wrong to summarily execute them, torture, etc. But do we really need to give them all the rights of an actual prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention? Heck, no.

What rights in particular do you think that they should have?

[ September 26, 2002, 16:40: Message edited by: Shralp ]

 

According to Amnesty (I am quite sure you dont give much for them) so borrowed the US a few torture experts from Pakistan and brought them to Guantanamo Bay so I atleast am not sure about the torture thing.
I think firstly that someone should decide what they are, if they are criminals they should have the same rights as all other criminals. And if they are prisoners of war they should have the same rights as other POW's. Would you think it right if american soldiers were kept with no rights at all somewhere in Afganistan? Or like they were kept in Vietnam. The US is all too often threading very close to acting like the things they are claiming to fight, when that truly happens the terrorist and other enemies win. That is one of their main goals.
Show the world that you are better than them.