So - where are the WMD ???

[LunarRay]

CADapopulus,

I did not see the part about we will meet again if you continue to be bad to decide what to do about it..... that is in mine... of course pdf and I can't post it. nor the reafirm Iraq et al are sovereign etc.

 

[LunarRay]

ITEM 12 BELOW IS MY POINT

4. Decides that false statements or omissions in the
declarations submitted by Iraq pursuant to this resolution
and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and
cooperate fully in the implementation of, this resolution
shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq's
obligations and will be reported to the Council for
assessment in accordance with paragraphs 11 and 12 below

11. Directs the Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC and the
Director General of the IAEA to report immediately to the
Council any interference by Iraq with inspection activities,
as well as any failure by Iraq to comply with its
disarmament obligations, including its obligations regarding
inspections under this resolution;

12. Decides to convene immediately upon receipt of a report
in accordance with paragraphs 4 or 11 above, in order to
consider the situation and the need for full compliance with
all of the relevant Council resolutions in order to secure
international peace and security;

13. Recalls, in that context, that the Council has
repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious
consequences as a result of its continued violations of its
obligations;

This was voted on and the US voted yes. So when they went back submitted what they thought (they is us) was the remedy and got shot down they decided to violate the res 1441 provision and invade anyway.

What you post above CAD, are the mitigators for the violation. All agree Saddam is Satan.

 

[LunarRay]

Oh yea, Oh yea, comes now before this Just Tribunal The United States Of America to answer why this court should not hold said nation and the peoples thereof in contempt of International Law to wit: After having agreed to abide by UN Security Counsel Resolution 1441, did so breach and by cause violate UN Charter and thereby International Treaty and Law. How plead you?

Well they had WMD and all evil was there. Seven Nations supported us and the rest sought not to intervene and we felt It was our duty to set aside the mentioned resolution in favor of immediate remedy to the clear danger Iraq posed to the nations proximate and afar. We found indications of all manner of WMD and the corpse of many slaughtered Iraqi and possible other nationalities in mass graves. We beseech the courts favor in this matter and submit on the evidence acknowledged and provided and herein contained, including 8x10 glossy photos with circles and arrows depicting all manner of grotesque and evil sights as well as this thimble full of sand from which we extracted signs of WMD.

We're Sorry.

 

[Moonbeam]

It says here on evidentiary item B, thimble containing trace amounts of WMD, that the assay was done by Rumsfeld. Could you please do a re-test of that sample. There are indications that the data may have been forged.

 

[CaptnKirk]

Op/Ed Piece from New York Times - by Thomas L. Friedman

BECAUSE WE COULD

The failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.'s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now.
Why? Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.<!-- BIGAD ad not targeted -->
The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn't enough because a terrorism bubble had built up over there ? a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did such things "martyrs" was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such "martyrs" was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.
The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don't believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government ? and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen ? got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.
The "right reason" for this war was the need to partner with Iraqis, post-Saddam, to build a progressive Arab regime. Because the real weapons of mass destruction that threaten us were never Saddam's missiles. The real weapons that threaten us are the growing number of angry, humiliated young Arabs and Muslims, who are produced by failed or failing Arab states ? young people who hate America more than they love life. Helping to build a decent Iraq as a model for others ? and solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ? are the necessary steps for defusing the ideas of mass destruction, which are what really threaten us.
The "moral reason" for the war was that Saddam's regime was an engine of mass destruction and genocide that had killed thousands of his own people, and neighbors, and needed to be stopped.
But because the Bush team never dared to spell out the real reason for the war, and (wrongly) felt that it could never win public or world support for the right reasons and the moral reasons, it opted for the stated reason: the notion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate threat to America. I argued before the war that Saddam posed no such threat to America, and had no links with Al Qaeda, and that we couldn't take the nation to war "on the wings of a lie." I argued that Mr. Bush should fight this war for the right reasons and the moral reasons. But he stuck with this W.M.D. argument for P.R. reasons.
Once the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the true extent of Saddam's genocidal evil, my view was that Mr. Bush did not need to find any W.M.D.'s to justify the war for me. I still feel that way. But I have to admit that I've always been fighting my own war in Iraq. Mr. Bush took the country into his war. And if it turns out that he fabricated the evidence for his war (which I wouldn't conclude yet), that would badly damage America and be a very serious matter.
But my ultimate point is this: Finding Iraq's W.M.D.'s is necessary to preserve the credibility of the Bush team, the neocons, Tony Blair and the C.I.A. But rebuilding Iraq is necessary to win the war. I won't feel one whit more secure if we find Saddam's W.M.D.'s, because I never felt he would use them on us. But I will feel terribly insecure if we fail to put Iraq onto a progressive path. Because if that doesn't happen, the terrorism bubble will reinflate and bad things will follow. Mr. Bush's credibility rides on finding W.M.D.'s, but America's future, and the future of the Mideast, rides on our building a different Iraq. We must not forget that.
</NYT_TEXT>
And from Maureen Dowd

BOMB AND SWITCH


Before 9/11, the administration had too little intelligence on Al Qaeda, badly coordinated by clashing officials.
Before the Iraq invasion, the administration had too much intelligence on Saddam, torqued up by conspiring officials.
As Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to make his case for invading Iraq to the U.N. on Feb. 5, a friend of his told me, he had to throw out a couple of hours' worth of sketchy intelligence other Bush officials were trying to stuff into his speech.<!-- BIGAD ad not targeted -->
U.S. News & World Report reveals this week that when Mr. Powell was rehearsing the case with two dozen officials, he became so frustrated by the dubious intelligence about Saddam that he tossed several pages in the air and declared: "I'm not reading this. This is $%&*#."
First America has no intelligence. Then it has $%&*# intelligence.
So this is progress?
For the first time in history, America is searching for the reason we went to war after the war is over.
As The Times's James Risen reports, a bedrock of the administration's weapons case ? the National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking nukes ? is itself being reassessed. The document is at the center of a broad prewar-intelligence review, being conducted by the C.I.A. to see whether the weapons evidence was cooked.
Conservatives are busily offering a bouquet of new justifications for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq that was sold as self-defense against Saddam's poised and thrumming weapons of mass destruction.
Pressed by reporters about whether Tony Blair and President Bush were guilty of hyperbole ? Mr. Blair's foreign secretary claimed Saddam could deploy chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes ? Senator John McCain replied, "The American people support what the president did, whether we find those weapons or not, and they did so the day they saw 9- and 10-year-old boys coming out of a prison in Baghdad."
Senator Pete Domenici noted that experts thought that Saddam's overthrow might pave the way for the Middle East road map to work. "For those kind of experts to say that has changed the dynamics in the Middle East, sufficient that we might get peace, seems to me to outweigh all the questions about did we have every bit of evidence that we say we had or not," he said.
In a Vanity Fair interview, Paul Wolfowitz said another "almost unnoticed but huge" reason for war was to promote Middle East peace by allowing the U.S. to take its troops out of Saudi Arabia ? Osama's b&ecirc;te noir. But it was after the U.S. announced it would pull its troops from Saudi Arabia that a resurgent Qaeda struck a Western compound, killing eight Americans.
And it was after the U.S. tried to intimidate other foes by stomping on Saddam that Iran and North Korea ratcheted up their nukes. Iran and North Korea actually do have scary nuclear programs, but if we express our alarm to the world now, will we be accused of crying Wolfowitz?
A new Pew survey of 21 nations shows a deepening skepticism toward the U.S. "The war had widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans, further inflamed the Muslim world, softened support for the war on terrorism, and significantly weakened global public support for the pillars of the post-World War II era ? the U.N. and the North Atlantic alliance," said Pew's director, Andrew Kohut.
Brits may be more upset with Mr. Blair than Americans are with Mr. Bush because they have the quaint idea that even if you think war was a good idea, you should level with the public about your objectives.
The Bush crowd practiced bait and switch, leaving many Americans with the impression that Saddam was involved in 9/11.
When James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director and current Pentagon adviser, appeared on "Nightline" five days after 9/11 and suggested that America had to strike Iraq for sponsoring terrorism, Ted Koppel rebutted: "Nobody right now is suggesting that Iraq had anything to do with this. In fact, quite the contrary."
Mr. Woolsey replied: "I don't think it matters. I don't think it matters." The Republicans will have to follow the maxim of Robert Moses, the autocratic New York builder who never let public opinion get in the way of his bulldozing: "If the ends don't justify the means, what does?"

 

[CaptnKirk]

Posting error.</NYT_TEXT>

 

[Fausto]

This seems appropriate for this thread.

 

Originally posted by: Fausto1
This seems appropriate for this thread.

Ha, I love it!

 

[Moonbeam]

Thanks for the Friedman piece, CaptnKirk. Juxtaposed with the 'if the ends don't justify the means, what does?' quote it sums up profoundly my feelings about this whole mess.

The party of character has none because they are duplicitous and devious and don't really believe in truth. For them there is only power and how to get what they want. Even when their goals could maybe be considered worthy, they slime them because all that's important in them is ambition. I think such people are psychologically profoundly damaged. They manipulate without a center from within. They will always fall flat because they cannot call on the soul of man. Where are men of moral vision who will lead, who will lay their cards on the table for everyone to see. The so called moral absolutists are as relative as can be. That our leaders fear us is plain to see.

 

[LunarRay]

Originally posted by: Moonbeam
It says here on evidentiary item B, thimble containing trace amounts of WMD, that the assay was done by Rumsfeld. Could you please do a re-test of that sample. There are indications that the data may have been forged.

We would be willing to stipulate to the POSSIBLE existence of trace amounts of WMD if it please the court and the people.