Page 8 of 8 FirstFirst ... 3 4 5 6 7 8
Results 176 to 186 of 186
  1. #176
    Join Date
    Sep 2001
    Location
    upstate NY
    Posts
    2,229
    It's too easy to invalidate the messenger but not the veracity of the message.
    I never said anything about them being wrong or right. I just think they should be identified in the story as who they are and what they stand for.

  2. #177
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Stuck in perpetual Meh
    Posts
    35,247
    Originally posted by half-fast
    I never said anything about them being wrong or right. I just think they should be identified in the story as who they are and what they stand for.
    So should the Heritage Foundation, which is VERY often quoted in support of the administration by every news outlet, be identified as the ultra-conservative organization they are every time they're mentioned? Where do the Brookings and Cato institutes fit in?

    If you've read more than the USAToday, you probably know by now that whichever ThinkTank criticizes the Administration is liberal and whoever supports it is conservative. it's become THAT polarized - no more free thought on either side.

    BTW - for my money I tend to listen to Brookings' experts more than the rest. They seem to have remembered how to critically analyze a situation without completely toeing the party line. I consider them the most "Centrist," which is how I'd label myself if forced to.

    Plus they have some hotties working in the media department...

  3. #178
    Join Date
    Sep 2001
    Location
    upstate NY
    Posts
    2,229
    So should the Heritage Foundation, which is VERY often quoted in support of the administration by every news outlet, be identified as the ultra-conservative organization they are every time they're mentioned? Where do the Brookings and Cato institutes fit in?
    if they have a stated political agenda-a la Ctr for American Progress (liberal)or Heritage Foundation(conservative) or Cato (libertarian)-it should be identified as such

    if they are non-partison, as brookings is supposed to be-no

  4. #179
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Summit County
    Posts
    5,058
    Originally posted by Tippster
    So should the Heritage Foundation, which is VERY often quoted in support of the administration by every news outlet, be identified as the ultra-conservative organization they are every time they're mentioned? Where do the Brookings and Cato institutes fit in?

    If you've read more than the USAToday, you probably know by now that whichever ThinkTank criticizes the Administration is liberal and whoever supports it is conservative. it's become THAT polarized - no more free thought on either side.

    BTW - for my money I tend to listen to Brookings' experts more than the rest. They seem to have remembered how to critically analyze a situation without completely toeing the party line. I consider them the most "Centrist," which is how I'd label myself if forced to.

    Plus they have some hotties working in the media department...
    Hanlon and Pollack have some of the best analysis out there.
    "The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" --Margaret Thatcher

  5. #180
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Location
    Stuck in perpetual Meh
    Posts
    35,247
    Originally posted by mr_gyptian
    Hanlon and Pollack have some of the best analysis out there.
    If you mean Michael O'Hanlon of Brookings, you're right. We just interviewed him today regarding the latest "Terror Warning" for the weekend.

  6. #181
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Summit County
    Posts
    5,058
    I went over the handle bars lst night and my dexterity is a little off.

    Yeah O'Hanlon.

    no fan of Ivo Daalder, though.
    "The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" --Margaret Thatcher

  7. #182
    Join Date
    Sep 2001
    Location
    Babylon
    Posts
    13,453
    People just dont pay attention.
    Bush Cheney/Blair still trot out the old "gassed his own people" tripe.
    which they know is not true:
    CIA officer Stephen C. Pelletiere was the agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. As professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, he says he was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf.

    In addition, he says he headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States, and the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

    Pelletiere went public with his information on no less a platform than The New York Times in an article on January 31 last year titled 'A War Crime or an Act of War?' The article which challenged the case for war quoted U.S. President George W. Bush as saying: ”The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured.”

    Pelletiere says the United States Defence Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report following the Halabja gassing, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need- to-know basis. ”That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas,” he wrote in The New York Times.

    The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja, he said. ”The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. ”The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.”

    Pelletiere writes that these facts have ”long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned.”

    Pelletiere wrote that Saddam Hussein has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. ”But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them.”

    Pelletiere has maintained his position. All Saddam would have to do in court now is to cite The New York Times article even if the court would not summon Pelletiere. The issues raised in the article would themselves be sufficient to raise serious questions about the charges filed against Saddam - and in turn the justifications offered last year for invading Iraq.

    The Halabja killings were cited not just by Bush but by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to justify his case for going along with a U.S. invasion of Iraq. A British government dossier released to justify the war on Iraq says that ”Saddam has used chemical weapons, not only against an enemy state, but against his own people.” An inquiry report in 1996 by Lord Justice Scott in what came to be known as the arms-to-Iraq affair gave dramatic pointers to what followed after Halabja. After the use of poison gas in 1988 both the United States and Britain began to supply Saddam Hussein with even more chemical weapons.

    The Scott inquiry had been set up in 1992 following the collapse of the trial in the case of Matrix Churchill, a British firm exporting equipment to Iraq that could be put to military use.

    Three senior executives of Matrix Churchill said the government knew what Matrix Churchill was doing, and that its managing director Paul Henderson had been supplying information about Iraq to the British intelligence agencies on a regular basis.

    The inquiry revealed details of the British government's secret decision to supply Saddam with even more weapons-related equipment after the Halabja killings.

    Former British foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe was found to have written that the end of the Iraq-Iran war could mean ”major opportunities for British industry” in military exports, but he wanted to keep that proposal quiet.

    ”It could look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales,” one of his officials told the Scott inquiry. Lord Scott condemned the government's decision to change its policy, while keeping MPs and the public in the dark.

    Soon after the attack, the United States approved the export to Iraq of virus cultures and a billion-dollar contract to design and build a petrochemical plant the Iraqis planned to use to produce mustard gas.
    .

  8. #183
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Summit County
    Posts
    5,058
    Nice try Woodsy. That guy is a crank. No one gave any credence to that NYTimes Ed back then, and they don't now.


    http://reason.com/hitandrun/000722.shtml
    "The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" --Margaret Thatcher

  9. #184
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    写道
    Posts
    13,434
    Daniel Ortega eats here.

  10. #185
    Join Date
    Dec 2002
    Location
    Fart Louderdale
    Posts
    636
    Just saw it. It was good.

    Everything was available in news and on the internet if you were willing to look, so no surprises there.

    Nice to see him put a face on the Iraqis and the soldiers.

    I though the woman who's son dies was gonna kick the woman's ass in DC who said "it's all staged" and "blame Al Quaeda."

    Meh. No one's gonna read this deep in the thread anyway. I'm going to poop on my kitchen floor and hit it with a hockey stick.


    J-

  11. #186
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    9,300ft
    Posts
    21,938

    Angry BULLSHIT

    WOODSY, THAT IS ABSOLUTE HORSESHIT!

    My God, how the fuck did any fucking idiot publish such idiotic horse shit whithout considering the obvious fucking evidence!!! Go look at the pictures and videos of the dead and injured. There are all clearly victims of nerve and vesicant (blister) agents. Some of them could have been victims of AC (hyrogen-cyanide, and certainly it was used in some other attacks), but that nerve and blister agents were used on Halabja (and other towns) is undeniable. The descriptions and images were *all* consistent with the effects of GA (tabun) and HN/HD.

    Halabja survivors:
    http://www.kdp.pp.se/10.jpg
    http://www.kdp.pp.se/ku03.jpg
    More images: (beware, unpleasant, cut and paste links, hotlinking is not working)
    http://free_iraqi.tripod.com/halabja10.jpg
    http://free_iraqi.tripod.com/halabja1.jpg
    http://free_iraqi.tripod.com/halabja4.jpg

    These injuries are characteristic of HN and HD (mustard) and other vesicants, NOT blood agents.

    Read the accounts of latent effects: burns, blisters, and blindness in the Kurdish survivors... of survivors in the hospital, drowning in their own mucous and suffering pneumonia and scarred lungs.

    We *KNOW* the Iraqis gassed the Kurds. THEY DID IT ON MULTIPLE OCCAISIONS, NOT JUST HALAJBA. We even know the commander who gave the orders in some instances.

    The UN investigated the gas attacks at least THREE times (or different events) and said all three times that IRAQ used CW and that they used blister agents and GA.

    The gassing of the Kurds by SADDAM was not invented by Bush, Sr or Jr. It was well publicized during the 80s when Saddam was still our "friend." Isn't there enough stuff to condem Bush on without trying to CHANGE HISTORY to suite your current political sentiments?????? Political revisionism is disgusting.
    Quote Originally Posted by blurred
    skiing is hiking all day so that you can ski on shitty gear for 5 minutes.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •