Selling woodworking tools on ebay - any pointers...

[Larry Blanchard]

No, I claimed we never found the "massive stockpiles" we said Iraq had. When both Bush and Powell have admitted they were wrong on this, don't you think you're beating a dead horse?

[Dave Hinz]

So, it's OK for you to generalize and say "my people" while putting words in my mouth for me, but when I use your tactic you balk. Interesting.

What part of "haven't found all of it yet" are you not understanding?

How many lethal doses is enough, Larry?

[Doug Miller]

Assumes facts not in evidence. All you, or anyone, can say with certainty at this point is that we haven't found them _yet_.

We haven't found Osama bin Laden yet either. Does that mean he doesn't exist?

-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek-at-milmac-dot-com)

Get a copy of my NEW AND IMPROVED TrollFilter for NewsProxy/Nfilter by sending email to autoresponder at filterinfo-at-milmac-dot-com You must use your REAL email address to get a response.

[Mark & Juanita]

I'm sure you don't appreciate the irony in the above remark. You seem to keep chanting the mantra that the WMD's were the sole reason for attacking Iraq. Failure to abide by 17 resolutions over 10 years, continued beligerence in threatening to unleash weapons that he apparently did not yet have, unearthing the mass graves of well over 100,000 of his own citizens, support for terrorists (Abu Nidal *was* killed in Baghdad (or committed suicide by shooting himself multiple times)) all serve as justification. Was our intelligence faulty? Yes. But the other irony here is that Bush is being accused of being a liar and manipulating the country in pre-empting a threat. Was Saddam a threat? There is sufficient evidence and testimony from former Hussein associates that even if an active WMD program was not present in the country when we attacked, Hussein had every intention of restarting those programs once the sanctions were lifted. So, in the case of Iraq, Bush was manipulative in pursuing pre-emption, yet the same people making this accusation are the same people accusing the administration of failing to act and pre-empt 9/11. So what if the intelligence had been correct? Would you have rather had the administration take a tentative approach and been proven wrong?

[Charlie Self]

Proving negatives is often damned near impossible.

Possibly. He may have been serving as a coat of paint on the inside of a cave roof for the past year plus some after hew was bombed out of the mountains. The tapes could easily be made by some kind of imitator.

Charlie Self "The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind." Jacques Barzun

[Andy Dingley]

An entirely false argument. We're discussing intent here, not risk.

Any number of _old_ shells would still fail to worry me at a political level (obviously they're a hazard for those dealing with them). A small indication of an _ongoing_ program is much more serious, even if it hadn't yet achieved much.

If I go within walking distance of my own house, I can excavate more evidence of abandoned chemical weapons than have so far been found in Iraq. And I don't even live in New Jersey, or Hanford, or Nancekuke.

[Andy Dingley]

An entirely false argument. We're discussing intent here, not risk.

Any number of _old_ shells would still fail to worry me at a political level (obviously they're a hazard for those dealing with them). A small indication of an _ongoing_ program is much more serious, even if it hadn't yet achieved much.

If I go within walking distance of my own house, I can excavate more evidence of abandoned chemical weapons than have so far been found in Iraq. And I don't even live in New Jersey, or Hanford, or Nancekuke.

[Dave Hinz]

I'm sure there's a perfectly innocent reason to have something that could kill 1000 or 2000 people. I'm also sure that, should that shell have been used as designed, those who died would have been pleased to know with their last thought that it wasn't intended and that their deaths were OK because it's just a risk.

OK, so there can be as many old ones as we find and it's OK, but if we find, say, mobile labs buried in a desert for making more WMD, then that's a problem? Or, are _those_ OK because there aren't any WMD in them, just the equipment made for making them, right?

Oh wait, that's not an _ongoing_ program, that's a mothballed piece of equipment to _continue_ an inactive program, so it's OK then, is that it?

How is that relevant to the situation in Iraq? Are you claiming that this statement (which I have a hard time believing, by the way) is typical, or are you saying you live in an abandoned chem weapons facility, or what's your point?

[Todd Fatheree]

Dave, you and I both know that at this point, we could find a whole warehouse full of Sarin, anthrax, plague, and mustard gas and it wouldn't matter to the left. They have so much invested in there being no WMDs, that they can't afford to acknowledge anything. If they did, Kerry might as well shut down his campaign.

todd

[Mark]

Clinton still has a burr under your saddle.

No, it's not a word game. If there is a word game being played it's by people using the term WMD to describe weapons that don't destroy.

Well, yes. You seem to have fallen in love with it, it and two others being the soul justification for the illegal and unjustified invasion of a sovereign nation.

Sure.

Go ahead.

One of the fallacies to your approach is 100% effectiveness. That is every microgram is going to find a target. That's like saying that every round discharged in Iraq found an Iraqi, so I guess we have 1,000,000 +++ dead Iraqis. Eh?

That's about right.

Let's say I'm a Cop and storm trooper your house with a warrant for a meth lab but after untold hours all I find is a musty old pot seed. I guess I'd be justified.

Let's say I find your quarter bag stash .... now I'm really justified.

So take your one shell, put it on it's pedestal, hang the placard of justification on it.

Hell, you may even thank God for it in your prayers.

Truth is, it isn't shit.

[Mark]

I guess that's a fair statement, foolish as it may be.

The Right has been following transparent and well known lies for a couple years now and they aren't any closer to accepting the truth.

[Nate Perkins]

Well, I don't know if I classify as being on the "left" or not (I'm somewhere between Jesse Helms and Paul Wellstone, so maybe I'm center).

However, it seems to me that actual facts and findings of actual WMDs would be of great difference to the majority of the people. The people and Congress have given the President a great deal of latitude and trust that he had privy to information that the rest of us did not. Now it appears to be inescapable that the information he had was erroneous or exaggerated.

Now, even the best leaders will make mistakes. Its how they deal with their mistakes that matters. Sometimes when the existing approach is failing, the best thing to do is to admit that a new approach is needed. The reality is that the American people have now been committed to Iraq, and that much depends on success in establishing a stable and peaceful Iraq. So the question is whether the voting public thinks that our current policies will succeed in this regard ... and whether our current leaders have the intelligence to adequately assess the situation, or the flexibility to admit their mistakes and change their policies.

[Todd Fatheree]

"Nate Perkins" wrote in message news: [e-mail]...

news:...

Just one correction. Congress had access to the same information that the President had. The difference between then and now is that it is politically expedient to pretend that they were totally dependent upon what the President told them. It's possible that the President relied too heavily on Tenet's statement that WMDs in Iraq was a "slam dunk". Frankly, I don't know what happened to the WMDs. It's not even debateable that Saddam had them. The only question is, where are they now? Keep in mind that this whole mess could have been avoided in Saddam had just complied fully with the Security Council resolutions and allowed unfettered inspections. By not doing so, he left us to make the only conclusion possible, which is that he had them and was protecting them. The sum total of all of our recent experience with Saddam was that he was a liar and a manipulator. So, when we go analyzing intelligence data that can never be fully complete (this isn't like flying over Cuba and snapping pictures of missle launchers), intelligence that on its face might fall in a gray area ends up being judged as evidence of WMDs. For the people who believe Bush made all of this up, I'd like to know the motivation. Wait, I know...it's so Haliburton can get $700 million in Iraq contracts. Look, I don't think even Bill Clinton would sacrafice 700+ soldiers and hundreds of billions of dollars just to get some political advantage, and that's saying a lot. No, wait...I know...we went there because of oil. Well, no shit! Do you think we'd give the middle east a second look if we didn't get a large percentage of our oil from there? Frankly, it would suit me fine if we all had alternative-fuel cars so we could cut off the middle east. Then they could go back to having wars with each other instead of with us.

todd

[Dave Hinz]

The tactic looks familiar, so I was pointing that out.

Definitions are what they are. If the common usage of "WMD" isn't to your liking, well, you can change it or adapt, your choice.

Your memory is _very_ selective, apparently. UN Resolutions, need I quote them? Even your boy Kerry said S.H. needed to be stopped, want dates and quotes?

Yay.

Do you know what "LD50" means? It's "Lethal dose for 50% of the people exposed to substance in (whichever) manner". That means half.

You said earlier that they're not destruction, they're murder. Now it's destructive enough to be destruction again? You're inconsistant.

Unlikely to happen on at least two counts, but do go on and on.

Because MJ is now meth? When did that happen?

Because a bigger bag of pot is a meth lab? Your analogy is flawed.

Lots of assumptions going on on your side of the screen.

I'm sure the tens of thousands of dead Kurds are comforted by that.

[Andy Dingley]

But you _haven't_, that's rather the point.

[Todd Fatheree]

Right now, it's a moot point. It wouldn't matter how much was found. Three shells found - those were just sloppy bookkeeping. Ten shells? Probably came from somewhere else. A hundred? Those must have been planted by the CIA or Haliburton. I tell you what...you tell me where the WMDs are right now. *Everybody* (Clinton administration, Bush administration, Hans Blix, UN, David Kay, US Congressmen on both sides of the aisle) knows he had them. The whole reason we went down this path is that Saddam didn't want to allow weapons *inspectors* (not weapon *finders*) complete access and couldn't provide proof that they had been destroyed. So, where are they now? Hell, I hope everybody was wrong and Saddam never had anything. It sure beats the alternative that they're just someplace else.

todd

[Fly-by-Night CC]

Slight correction... They *believe/d* he had them. And, they likely believed it to the point of stating it as fact - though it doesn't so much appear as fact today.

The questions to ask are: why did was the intelligence apparently so incorrect (so far, anyway); and, who was supplying the insider info to the intelligence sources and for what purpose?

[Nate Perkins]

No, this isn't true. The NSA, NSC, CIA briefs etc are all classified for national security purposes, and only portions of them are released to Congress in certain committees such as the House and Senate Armed Services Committees and Select Intelligence Committees. It is true that Congress did have access to some of the information that the administration had, but certainly not all. Many in Congress and in the general public took the President at his word (understandably) when he said that the threat was imminent. For example:

The difference between then and now is that it is

I think this is a little exaggerated. I don't think anyone has claimed that they were totally dependent on what the President told them. But I think that many of us (reasonably) deferred to the President when he claimed that he had ironclad intelligence of a compelling threat. I agree that the Democrats were very weak on the Iraq matter, largely for political reasons. Congress basically relinquished its obligation to declare war, because it was too weak to take a stand that may prove false. Plenty of blame to go around, but when you are the President the Buck Stops with you.

It wasn't just Tenet. The way it appears to me, the White House team (Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Tenet) had the notion that Saddam was an immediate threat, and they chose only those parts of the intelligence that supported that position. They took questionable characters like Chalabi into their confidence. And when people urged caution (Powell, O'Neill, Clarke, Blix, El-Baradi) they were overridden. Understandably, the Administration did not want to miss a threat in the wake of 9/11 ... however, a leading quality of a President is to be able to distinguish credibility among various inputs.

It's true that he had them in 1994 (UNSCOM scrapped a huge pile of them then), but it's not at all clear that he had them anytime after

1996. All of the other claims of compelling evidence (aluminum tubes, yellow cake, drones, mobile labs, etc etc) are all pretty much discredited now. I don't think any knowledgeable sources claim any recent evidence.

At the end, the UN inspectors were going into anywhere (palaces included) with 10 minutes notice. But at the end there was basically nothing he could have done that would have been satisfactory. Wouldn't you agree that we were pretty much decided that we were going to invade, regardless of what Saddam or our allies in NATO or the UN said?

Nobody (and I mean nobody) liked Saddam, but I think you are grasping at straws to justify what we did. Saddam was contained, he had no WMDs, and our statements to the contrary were all wrong. Now we need to evaluate whether our current policies there are working in rebuilding and democratizing the country. Part of the mark of good leadership is to use judicious judgement in evaluating a situation and in exhibiting flexibility when the plan goes awry.

I'm a scientist. I know that the hallmarks of a large WMD program are in fact readily visible from the air and with modern satellites. When you look at the size of our own plutonium enrichment facilities, the size of our own chemical plants, and the size of our own pharmaceutical plants this becomes clear. It's just credulous to assume that these things can be done from the back of a tractor trailer.

Wow. I don't think so. I think Bush was genuinely and understandably spooked by 9/11, and he was determined to make sure that it did not repeat. I think he could not easily track down Al Qaeda, so he turned to what he thought was an immediate, identifiable, and addressable threat. I think he intentionally exaggerated the evidence, thinking that this was the only way to enlist the support of the public. With honorable motivation and for our own good, but misled nonetheless.

If he had been right, he would be a hero now. The problem is that he was wrong. His assessment of the immediacy of the threat was wrong, and his assessment of the ease of democratizing Iraq was likewise wrong. I think his judgement was incredibly poor. Someday I will probably vote Republican again (I used to), but this year I will likely not vote for someone who has demonstrated poor judgement and failed policy.

All right! Agreed! Energy independence is a good investment for the US in the long run.

[Larry Blanchard]

Well, I'm not going to spend a lot of time looking for stuff that's been on the news for all to see, but here's a quick reference to Powell. He's probably got more crrdibility left than most of the administration.

[Dave Hinz]

Quite the backpedal there, Larry.