Somehow campaigning for their Dad Mitt is comensurate with soldiering in Mitt-speak. I'm not sure if I would be a war-resister in this conflict or not, it isn't a choice I have to make. I have little to no enthusiasm for anybody's kid being in Iraq, except for maybe GHW Bush's kid. But for a war booster to equate his son's campaigning for him with soldiering frosts my pumpkin. There is a natural outcome of soldiering in Iraq, people try to kill you and if you're going to back that play you should be willing to risk something, even if it is just telling the truth - we're rich and my kids don't want to soldier in Iraq and I want somebody's kids to do it.
Mitt, you're a double dealing punk, you lie about why we went to war, you pump your theocratic agenda and won't tolerate for your theology to be a topic, and you rich people shouldn't have to sacrifice anything, not to mention that the list of what you were for before you were against it is mind-boggling. pah
11 comments:
OK....Chuck, what will it take,another 3,000, 6,000, 60,000 thousand dead right here, before you get off the Bush BS?
Were all those world leaders just as stupid as....well you know, and don't forget all of congress giving him the go-ahead to respond in kind to just 3,000 dead.
GOD YOU SOUND LIKE A DEMOCRAT/PROGESSIVE/LIBBER! LEAVE IT UP, DON'T DELETE IT.
WTF would any of your candidates do if God help us, one takes office and we are hit with an attack that kills ..oh say half of a certain East Oregon community?
You cannot run from this, the old Bash Bush BS isn't playing well in some parts of this state, but you go ahead and catch up when you can.
I will always include such "rebuttals" and I do not delete comments unless they are stupidly rude. YOU SAID/
Your like all libbers Chuck, you want to hammer a point home and then run when you know you pissed someone off. How you gonna win a war if a libber is ever in the WHITE HOUSE, with that kind of mindset? YOUR NOT!
Ever think how your words play????? No you do not!!
My points are simply a direct man to man response....YOU NEED TO FACE THE FIGHT IF YOU POST SOMETHING THAT DOESN'T PLAY WELL.
Where do these freaks come from? Mitt has no guts and is a theocratic bum. Another "rich are better than the middle class and deserve better". In a revolution those rich folk make dandy targets. Madame de Farge is kniting a list and checking it often
Back in WW2 times the rich thought that maybe they had an obligation to serve. I'm no fan of Ted Kennedy but his brothers did serve as did FDR's kid. Abraham Lincoln's son served.
Something changed during Viet Nam and since then the rich think they have some kind of Yuppie sense of entitlement.
Noteable exceptions, Duncan Hunter, Jim Webb. Different kind of people than GWB and Deferment Dick.
Pretty funny anons, I have yet to back up from a post and as a matter of fact I back my words with my name and my face. I play straight & I play fair, I mentioned the man's company in an article, he took the time to contact me so he should have his say. I answered his points and I didn't back up an inch.
If I refuse opposing viewpoints or criticisms I lose credibility, I'll include them as long as they maintain some semblence of politeness.
Any of the candidates for president in 04 & primaries would've hit Afghanistan. Iraq is another deal alogether, it had not one thing to do with 9/11, nothing, even your dear leader Bush has admitted that, Cheney won't let it go, but he's been a liar for too long to change his ways.
As far as sounding like a progressive liberal, I'm a leftwing Democrat though you may find it odd that I care about ALL of the BOR.
Dear Chuck: If I post a bunch of bandwith on Al-QUEDA, in Iraq, connections to Saddam,the one point Bush made that we would hunt them down where we found them..YOU PROMISE NOT TO DO THE OLD "BUSH LIED" CRAP???
That your a left-wing Democrat is a bit of (be nice now Anon)CRAP!!
I didn't know HARRY TRUMAN(A REAL DEMOCRAT) but I do know, you're no Harry Truman...period!
Lastly, I will not cuss(blue language) threaten you and yours, or offend your Mom ,I DON'T HAVE TO BE NICE ....IF YOU UPSET ME, OR OFFEND ME.
Finally..I THINK Bush sucks,so know more of the Bushbot comments.
My war is with those that will not fight the La Raza doctrine bunch, the celebrate diversity folks, the can't we all just get along people...cause we can't.
Don't back down Chuck.you'd really make my case.
I'll take the CIA & NSA over a bunch of winger stuff. Saddam paid "insurance" to families of suicide bombers in Israel. That was the extent of his "state sanctioned terrorism." That would be Israel's war, not ours. Iraq had not squat to do with any hits against the US under Saddam.
Bush lied, and lied again when he said he never said it. It is on film him blaming Iraq for 9/11, Cheney did it this spring. He said there were WMDs. There were not. He has not been right one time regarding Iraq and he has lied. Why do you take his word? Or the word of all his appollogists if you think he sucks?
I've heard an idea, not new, bandied about that goes something like "any time U.S. forces are engaged in a conflict beyond 90 days the selective service starts drafting." No college deferments, no exemptions (except maybe start with the Bush twins, sure.)
Might have the dual benefits of making the "man on the street" pay attention to how his own children are being used and at the same time ensure the professional military, which I respect, does not become the political military, which should rightly concern us all.
Hey Chuck:Yeah I know, IT'S A RIGHT WINGER DEAL, But I got a hell of a bunch more....But as long as you do the "bubba" 101 deny ...deny dance...IT'S USELESS.
Document Details WMD Recovered In Iraq, Santorum Says
By Melanie Hunter
CNSNews.com Senior Editor
June 21, 2006
(CNSNews.com) - Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.) announced Wednesday the discovery of more than 500 munitions or weapons of mass destruction, specifically "sarin- and mustard-filled projectiles," in Iraq.
Reading from unclassified portions of a document developed by the U.S. intelligence community, Santorum said, "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."
According to Santorum, "That means in addition to the 500, there are filled and unfilled munitions still believed to exist within the country."
Reading from the document, Santorum added, "Pre-Gulf War Iraqi chemical weapons could be sold on the Black Market. Use of these weapons by terrorist or insurgent groups would have implications for coalition forces in Iraq. The possibility of use outside of Iraq cannot be ruled out. The most likely munitions remaining are sarin- and mustard-filled projectiles. And I underscore filled."
Santorum said the "purity of the agents inside the munitions depends on many factors, including the manufacturing process, potential additives and environmental storage conditions."
While acknowledging that the agents "degrade over time," the document said that the chemicals "remain hazardous and potentially lethal."
The media has reported that "insurgents and Iraqi groups" want to "acquire and use chemical weapons," Santorum noted.
The Pennsylvania senator called the finding "incredibly" significant.
"The idea that, as my colleagues have repeatedly said in this debate on the other side of the aisle, that there are no weapons of mass destruction is in fact false," Santorum said. "We have found over 500 weapons of mass destruction and in fact have found that there are additional chemical weapons still in the country."
Cybercast News Service reported on Oct. 4, 2004 that Saddam Hussein had procured weapons of mass destruction and had developed extensive links to al Qaeda. A follow-up report on Oct. 13, 2004 detailed how the CIA's chief weapons inspector in Iraq had provided details corroborating information contained in 42 pages of Iraqi intelligence documents obtained by Cybercast News Service..
The so-called Duelfer report, named for its author, Charles Duelfer, is widely recognized for declaring that no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. Other details of the report, however, provide a glimpse of what some Iraq experts say is Saddam's attempt to continue to wage war against the U.S. after the first Gulf War ended.
HEY CHUCK:
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
© 2004 Insight/News World Communications Inc.
New evidence out of Iraq suggests the U.S. effort to track down Saddam Hussein's missing weapons of mass destruction is having better success than is being reported.
Key assertions by the intelligence community widely judged in the media and by critics of President Bush as having been false are turning out to have been true after all.
But this stunning news has received little attention from the major media, and the president's critics continue to insist that "no weapons" have been found.
In virtually every case -- chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missiles -- the United States has found the weapons and the programs that the Iraqi dictator successfully concealed for 12 years from U.N. weapons inspectors.
The Iraq Survey Group, ISG, whose intelligence analysts are managed by Charles Duelfer, a former State Department official and deputy chief of the U.N.-led arms-inspection teams, has found "hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited" under U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior administration official tells Insight.
"There is a long list of charges made by the U.S. that have been confirmed, but none of this seems to mean anything because the weapons that were unaccounted for by the United Nations remain unaccounted for."
Both Duelfer and his predecessor, David Kay, reported to Congress that the evidence they had found on the ground in Iraq showed Saddam's regime was in "material violation" of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the last of 17 resolutions that promised "serious consequences" if Iraq did not make a complete disclosure of its weapons programs and dismantle them in a verifiable manner.
The United States cited Iraq's refusal to comply with these demands as one justification for going to war.
Both Duelfer and Kay found Iraq had "a clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses with equipment that was suitable to continuing its prohibited chemical- and biological-weapons [BW] programs," the official said. "They found a prison laboratory where we suspect they tested biological weapons on human subjects."
They found equipment for "uranium-enrichment centrifuges" whose only plausible use was as part of a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In all these cases, "Iraqi scientists had been told before the war not to declare their activities to the U.N. inspectors," the official said.
But while the president's critics and the media might plausibly hide behind ambiguity and a lack of sensational-looking finds for not reporting some discoveries, in the case of Saddam's ballistic-missile programs they have no excuse for their silence.
"Where were the missiles? We found them," another senior administration official told Insight.
"Saddam Hussein's prohibited missile programs are as close to a slam dunk as you will ever find for violating United Nations resolutions," the first official said. Both senior administration officials spoke to Insight on condition that neither their name nor their agency be identified, but their accounts of what the United States has found in Iraq coincided in every major area.
When former weapons inspector Kay reported to Congress in January that the United States had found "no stockpiles" of forbidden weapons in Iraq, his conclusions made front-page news. But when he detailed what the ISG had found in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence last October, few took notice.
Among Kay's revelations, which officials tell Insight have been amplified in subsequent inspections in recent weeks:
A prison laboratory complex that may have been used for human testing of BW agents and "that Iraqi officials working to prepare the U.N. inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the U.N." Why was Saddam interested in testing biological-warfare agents on humans if he didn't have a biological-weapons program?
"Reference strains" of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi BW scientist. "We thought it was a big deal," a senior administration official said. "But it has been written off [by the press] as a sort of 'starter set.'"
New research on BW-applicable agents, brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin that were not declared to the United Nations.
A line of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, or drones, "not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 kilometers [311 miles], 350 kilometers [217 miles] beyond the permissible limit."
"Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited Scud-variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the U.N."
"Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1,000 kilometers [621 miles] -- well beyond the 150-kilometer-range limit [93 miles] imposed by the U.N. Missiles of a 1,000-kilometer range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara [Turkey], Cairo [Egypt] and Abu Dhabi [United Arab Emirates]."
In addition, through interviews with Iraqi scientists, seized documents and other evidence, the ISG learned the Iraqi government had made "clandestine attempts between late 1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300-kilometer-range [807 miles] ballistic missiles -- probably the No Dong -- 300-kilometer-range [186 miles] antiship cruise missiles and other prohibited military equipment," Kay reported.
In testimony before Congress on March 30, Duelfer, revealed the ISG had found evidence of a "crash program" to construct new plants capable of making chemical- and biological-warfare agents.
The ISG also found a previously undeclared program to build a "high-speed rail gun," a device apparently designed for testing nuclear-weapons materials. That came in addition to 500 tons of natural uranium stockpiled at Iraq's main declared nuclear site south of Baghdad, which International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky acknowledged to Insight had been intended for "a clandestine nuclear-weapons program."
In taking apart Iraq's clandestine procurement network, Duelfer said his investigators had discovered that "the primary source of illicit financing for this system was oil smuggling conducted through government-to-government protocols negotiated with neighboring countries [and] from kickback payments made on contracts set up through the U.N. oil-for-food program."
What the president's critics and the media widely have portrayed as the most dramatic failure of the U.S. case against Saddam has been the claimed failure to find "stockpiles" of chemical and biological weapons. But in a June 2003 Washington Post op-ed, former chief U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus called such criticism "a distortion and a trivialization of a major threat to international peace and security."
The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction concluded that Saddam "probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons [MT] and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW [chemical warfare] agents -- much of it added in the last year."
That assessment was based, in part, on conclusions contained in the final report from U.N. weapons inspectors in 1999, which highlighted discrepancies in what the Iraqis reported to the United Nations and the amount of precursor chemicals U.N. arms inspectors could document Iraq had imported but for which it no longer could account.
Until now, Bush's critics say, no stockpiles of CW agents made with those precursors have been found. The snap conclusion they draw is that the administration "lied" to the American people to create a pretext for invading Iraq.
But what are "stockpiles" of CW agents supposed to look like? Was anyone seriously expecting Saddam to have left behind freshly painted warehouses packed with chemical munitions, all neatly laid out in serried rows, with labels written in English?
Or did they think that a captured Saddam would guide U.S. troops to smoking vats full of nerve gas in an abandoned factory?
Stockpiles found
In fact, as recent evidence made public by a former operations officer for the Coalition Provisional Authority's intelligence unit in Iraq shows, some of those stockpiles have been found - not all at once, and not all in nice working order -- but found all the same.
Douglas Hanson was a U.S. Army cavalry reconnaissance officer for 20 years, and a veteran of Gulf War I. He was an atomic demolitions munitions security officer and a nuclear, biological and chemical defense officer. As a civilian analyst in Iraq last summer, he worked for an operations intelligence unit of the CPA in Iraq, and later, with the newly formed Ministry of Science and Technology, which was responsible for finding new, nonlethal employment for Iraqi WMD scientists.
In an interview with Insight and in an article he wrote for the online magazine AmericanThinker.com, Hanson examines reports from U.S. combat units and public information confirming that many of Iraq's CW stockpiles have indeed been found.
Until now, however, journalists have devoted scant attention to this evidence, in part because it contradicts the story line they have been putting forward since the U.S.-led inspections began after the war.
But another reason for the media silence may stem from the seemingly undramatic nature of the "finds" Hanson and others have described. The materials that constitute Saddam's chemical-weapons "stockpiles" look an awful lot like pesticides, which they indeed resemble.
"Pesticides are the key elements in the chemical-agent arena," Hanson says. "In fact, the general pesticide chemical formula (organophosphate) is the 'grandfather' of modern-day nerve agents."
The United Nations was fully aware that Saddam had established his chemical-weapons plants under the guise of a permitted civilian chemical-industry infrastructure. Plants inspected in the early 1990s as CW production facilities had been set up to appear as if they were producing pesticides, or in the case of a giant plant near Fallujah, chlorine, which is used to produce mustard gas.
When coalition forces entered Iraq, "huge warehouses and caches of 'commercial and agricultural' chemicals were seized and painstakingly tested by Army and Marine chemical specialists," Hanson writes. "What was surprising was how quickly the ISG refuted the findings of our ground forces and how silent they have been on the significance of these caches."
Caches of "commercial and agricultural" chemicals don't match the expectation of "stockpiles" of chemical weapons. But, in fact, that is precisely what they are. "At a very minimum," Hanson tells Insight, "they were storing the precursors to restart a chemical-warfare program very quickly."
Kay and Duelfer came to a similar conclusion, telling Congress under oath that Saddam had built new facilities and stockpiled the materials to relaunch production of chemical and biological weapons at a moment's notice. At Karbala, U.S. troops stumbled upon 55-gallon drums of pesticides at what appeared to be a very large "agricultural supply" area, Hanson says. Some of the drums were stored in a "camouflaged bunker complex" that was shown to reporters -- with unpleasant results.
"More than a dozen soldiers, a Knight-Ridder reporter, a CNN cameraman, and two Iraqi POWs came down with symptoms consistent with exposure to a nerve agent," Hanson says. "But later ISG tests resulted in a proclamation of negative, end of story, nothing to see here, etc., and the earlier findings and injuries dissolved into nonexistence. Left unexplained is the small matter of the obvious pains taken to disguise the cache of ostensibly legitimate pesticides. One wonders about the advantage an agricultural-commodities business gains by securing drums of pesticide in camouflaged bunkers 6 feet underground. The 'agricultural site' was also colocated with a military ammunition dump -- evidently nothing more than a coincidence in the eyes of the ISG."
That wasn't the only significant find by coalition troops of probable CW stockpiles, Hanson believes. Near the northern Iraqi town of Bai'ji, where Saddam had built a chemical-weapons plant known to the United States from nearly 12 years of inspections, elements of the 4th Infantry Division found 55-gallon drums containing a substance identified through mass spectrometry analysis as cyclosarin -- a nerve agent.
Nearby were surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles, gas masks and a mobile laboratory that could have been used to mix chemicals at the site.
"Of course, later tests by the experts revealed that these were only the ubiquitous pesticides that everybody was turning up," Hanson says. "It seems Iraqi soldiers were obsessed with keeping ammo dumps insect-free, according to the reading of the evidence now enshrined by the conventional wisdom that 'no WMD stockpiles have been discovered.'"
At Taji -- an Iraqi weapons complex as large as the District of Columbia -- U.S. combat units discovered more "pesticides" stockpiled in specially built containers, smaller in diameter but much longer than the standard 55-gallon drum.
Hanson says he still recalls the military sending digital images of the canisters to his office, where his boss at the Ministry of Science and Technology translated the Arabic-language markings. "They were labeled as pesticides," he says. "Gee, you sure have got a lot of pesticides stored in ammo dumps."
Again, this January, Danish forces found 120-millimeter mortar shells filled with a mysterious liquid that initially tested positive for blister agents. But subsequent tests by the United States disputed that finding.
"If it wasn't a chemical agent, what was it?" Hanson asks. "More pesticides? Dish-washing detergent? From this old soldier's perspective, I gain nothing from putting a liquid in my mortar rounds unless that stuff will do bad things to the enemy."
The discoveries Hanson describes are not dramatic. And that's the problem: Finding real stockpiles in grubby ammo dumps doesn't fit the image the media and the president's critics carefully have fed to the public of what Iraq's weapons ought to look like. A senior administration official who has gone through the intelligence reporting from Iraq as well as the earlier reports from U.N. arms inspectors refers to another well-documented allegation.
"The Iraqis admitted they had made 3.9 tons of VX," a powerful nerve gas, but claimed they had never weaponized it. The U.N. inspectors "felt they had more. But where did it go?" The Iraqis never provided any explanation of what had happened to their VX stockpiles.
What does 3.9 tons of VX look like? "It could fit in one large garage," the official says. Assuming, of course, that Saddam would assemble every bit of VX gas his scientists had produced at a single site, that still amounts to one large garage in an area the size of the state of California.
Senior administration officials stress that the investigation will continue as inspectors comb through millions of pages of documents in Iraq and attempt to interview Iraqi weapons scientists who have been trained all their professional lives to conceal their activities from the outside world.
"The conditions under which the ISG is working are not very conducive," one official said. "But this president wants the truth to come out. This is not an exercise in spinning or censoring."
ANON(that would be me)wished you would just stop with the Bush lied stuff...cause if he did,more people then he lied as well.
You go on now ...and have a nice day!
PS:Dear Chuck: If I post a bunch of bandwith on Al-QUEDA, in Iraq, connections to Saddam,the one point Bush made that we would hunt them down where we found them..YOU PROMISE NOT TO DO THE OLD "BUSH LIED" CRAP???
CHUCK LIED...CHUCK LIED!!!
Bush lied. Or was wrong enough to be utterly stupid. You run old stuff that was discredited shortly after it was run as - what? Sorry, Iraq was not the problem. The kid wanted to show daddy up, the drunk/dry drunk hasn't outgrown that crap.
dis-credited by who>>>> the NY TIMES OR CHUCK.???
May I again suggest more fiber in your diet...YOUR SO FULL, WELL YOU KNOW!
Post a Comment