More Agent Orange Sprayed in Vietnam Than Thought

DreamTone7 · Joined: 20 Sep 2002 Posts: 2571

Since you were more than willing to ask those questions, how about you answer them first?

debbie mannas · Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 1352

Why should I? I didn't bring the subject up.

SA is the one who said "The difference is that I am willing to admit that". So I invited him to go ahead.

Why don't you?

Edited by: debbie mannas at: 4/25/03 3:52:40 pm

debbie mannas · Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 1352

my earlier post

"So what are you saying...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Are you saying they didn't use fabricated evidence, or plagiarised documents based on 1991 data??

Are you saying they made a case for the war with proof? "

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Was addressed to you Dreamtone, not SA. I seldom address anything to him.

What evidence convinced you the war was necessary?

DreamTone7 · Joined: 20 Sep 2002 Posts: 2571

When it became clear to me how Saddam was playing "the shell game" with the UN inspectors, I knew that Saddam was hiding something. You don't play that game when you have nothing to hide. I am convinced by his actions that he had WMD. This is supported by his use of such weapons against Iran, and post-war by the mass Kurdish graves. He has had plenty of time to shuffle this stuff off to Syria.....as I predicted he would in a previous post. That's where his buddies ended up as well. It figures.....he's been selling oil outside of OPEC through the back door to Syria, making billions, and letting his own people go hungry. So Syria was the most likely place to "hide" all his "junk". (Sounds like a dope-deal, doesn't it?)

I realize that you probably don't accept most of this, but we were discussing what convinced me, not you. Remember?

debbie mannas · Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 1352

The war against Iran was many years ago. What if the inspectors HAD been successful enough to limit Iraq's reach?

If he had shuffled the stuff of to Syria, then whats the point of bombing Iraq? Why not bomb Syria instead? What if the stuff is NOT in Syria any more, but in Saudi, or Pakistan?

How were you convinced that the whole world was at risk of being wiped out by Iraq? That was the reason for the war, remember?

I'm amazed you need so little convincing to declare war, and yet refuse to accept the dangers of DU. How about cluster bombs? Will you tell your child not to play with bright shiny objects too?

Actually the WMDs the US has been selling is more like a dope deal than anything else.

Did you hear about the forgeries bush used to get the senate vote? Was it ever in the news? What's your opinion on that?

Did you hear about how Blair used a plagiarised document based on 1991 research by a post-grad student to try and swing his support? What's your opinion on that?

Do you really believe the US Govt is going to allow an Iraq government to exist that is not pro-US in its policies?

DreamTone7 · Joined: 20 Sep 2002 Posts: 2571

Boy! Lots of questions Debbie!

We obiously didn't know where the WMD was. Saddam probably waited 'til the last minute to get rid of the "evidence". Then, assuming we believed he didn't have any more, go to Syria and get it back once the threat of war was over. This game could have gone on for years......if we allowed it to. If Syria has it it's not that big a deal. Responsible people can handle things like that.....it's the irresponsible ones (like Saddam) that we have to worry about. Iraq is/was not the only country with WMD, obviously. But they (Iraq) showed themselves to be irresponsible with the stuff. Saddam was "a loose cannon", if you will. This also sends a good message to those countries that have "the stuff".

BTW, I'm not going to wait until the whole world is destroyed before deciding that it is in the best interest of all to do something about people like Saddam.........IMO, we waited too long with him, and with Hitler.

Cluster bombs? Where's the proof that that is what these explosions are? They could just as easily be (and more likely are) mines layed by good old Saddam that have been laying around.....possibly for a long time.

I do believe that, ultimately, the US will give total control back to the Iraqi people of their country. What they do with it after that is up to them.....not us.

I didn't hear about the "Bush forgeries to the senate". Please educate me (in your own unique way).

debbie mannas · Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 1352

Dreamtone, its hard to believe that the forgeries that the pentagon used didnt make it to your news. It was BIG BIG news the world over. But I'm not surprised. I have friends and two siblings living in the US, and they tell me the news there is so biased its unbelievable. One sibling just refuses to listen to the news any more, just cant be bothered.

Here are some press articles:

www.smh.com.au/articles/2...71907.html

www.kentucky.com/mld/kent...394313.htm

www.ccmep.org/2003_articl...orgery.htm

Now Senator Waxman is demanding to know how such a thing could have happened. Because those documents are what they used to get the unanimous senate vote. This is a very very interesting document:

www.fas.org/irp/news/2003/03/waxman.pdf

As to the UK "Dossier" hahahahahaha

www.itv.com/news/1894417.html

There's a LOT of material on the web. I could keep posting links, but its getting boring.

You'd better believe that these guys have lost ALL credibility with the world.

debbie mannas · Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 1352

www.alternet.org/story.ht...ryID=15711

By Robert Scheer, AlterNet

April 22, 2003

The 'threats' that Hussein posed to the United States are nowhere to be found.

Now that the war has been won, is it permissible to suggest that our emperor has no clothes? I'm not referring to his abysmal stewardship of the economy but rather the fig-leaf war he donned to cover up his glaring domestic failures. President Bush went to war with Hitler's Germany and found another Afghanistan instead. After comparing the threat of Hussein to that of the Führer, it was odd to find upon our arrival a tottering regime squatting on a demoralized Third World populace.

Now the pressure is on for Bush to find or plant those alleged weapons of mass destruction fast or stand exposed as a bullying fraud.

Of course, our vaunted intelligence forces knew well from our overhead flights and the reports of U.N. inspectors freely surveying the country that Iraq had been reduced to a paper tiger by two decades of wars, sanctions and arms inspections, but that didn't keep the current administration from depicting Baghdad as a seat of evil so powerful it might soon block the very sun from shining.

And while Emperor Bush piled on the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric, his bespectacled vizier for defense presented a mad-hatter laundry list of Iraq's alleged weapons collection, as long and specific as it was phony and circumstantial.

Secretary of State Colin Powell's now infamous speech to the U.N. Security Council employed "intelligence" cribbed from a graduate student's thesis, documents later acknowledged as fakes, and a defector's affirmation of the existence of chemical weapons – while excluding his admission that they had subsequently been destroyed.

Having taken over the country, we now know with a great deal of certainty that if chemical or biological weapons were extant there, they were not deployed within the Iraqi military in a manner that threatened the U.S. or anyone else.

Likewise, Bush's fear-mongering about Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program has proven baseless. There was no reason to hurriedly yank the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq.

Even Bush's only real ally outside of Washington, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is worried that the fearsome weapons will not turn up – or that a skeptical world will believe they were planted as an afterthought. "Some sort of objective verification" of weapons finds would be a "good idea," he said last week.

However, the refusal of the U.S. to permit the return of U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix and his team to continue their work is damning evidence of our fear that the weapons simply do not exist, at least in any usable quantity or form. It also raises the suspicion that Iraqi scientists now held incommunicado in U.S. captivity will be squeezed until they tell us what we want to hear. Whatever happened to the prewar demand that those same scientists be given the freedom to tell their story in a non-intimidating environment?

Bush may fear the truth because the still-AWOL weapons are a potential tar baby for this administration. Undoubtedly the U.S. will find mixed-used chemical precursors for weapons, as was claimed only this week, but that is a far cry from being an "imminent threat."

As Joseph Cirincione, a top weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment, put it, the purported existence of those weapons "was the core reason for going to war with Iraq and the reason we had to go now. If we don't find fairly large stockpiles of these weapons, in quantities large enough to pose a strategic threat to the United States, the president's credibility will be seriously undermined and the legitimacy of the war repudiated."

That concern is largely absent in the U.S. media, where "liberation" is now a code word that smoothes over any irritating questions one may ask when a Christian superpower invades the heart of the Muslim world. Its partner phrase, "the building of democracy," is also all the rage, as if real democracy were something you could create with Legos or SimCity software.

At this point, though, we can only hope it will all turn out for the best, and that a retired U.S. general will figure out how to use the country's natural resources to end poverty, build excellent schools, provide crime-free streets, and install an electoral system in which positions of power don't go to the highest bidder. Then he can come back and apply this genius at home, where we have plenty of unwelcome violence, poverty and politicians on the take.

However, in the unlikely case this fantasy comes true, albeit at an untold price in money, lives and human suffering, it should be remembered that this was not the justification for war given to the American people.

And, in a more sober mood, one must still ask the embarrassing yet essential question: Did our president knowingly deceive us in his rush to war?

If he did, and we are truly concerned about our own democracy, we would have to acknowledge that such an egregious abuse of power rises to the status of an impeachable offense.

DreamTone7 · Joined: 20 Sep 2002 Posts: 2571

I will read your links when I have time.

I still strongly believe that there are WMD that Saddam obviously (at one point) had located in Syria. It doesn't mean that they weren't in Iraq before we made it to Bagdhad! We had enough trouble finding his Scuds 12 years ago.....he certainly could have smuggled the "stuff" out of Iraq to some other country. I also believe that if we didn't go in, that Saddam would still be there, and still have them. Just because we can't find them there now, doesn't mean they weren't there before. Otherewise Saddam would not have been playing games with the inspectors the way he was. Can anyone come up with another reason why he might be jerking the inspectors around the way he did?

None of this "stuff" just vanishes into thin air......it's somewhere yet to be discovered. Forgeries or not. I just hope we don't have to "find out", somewhere down the road, where this "stuff" ended up.

debbie mannas · Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 1352

The forgeries were intended to convince the world that Iraq was going nuclear.

It wasn't about chemical or biological weapons he already had. The senate gave its approval based on that urgency.

IT WAS A LIE.

Is your government still credible to you?

DreamTone7 · Joined: 20 Sep 2002 Posts: 2571

Read this please:

www.iiss.org/news-more.php?itemID=88

I remember reading (can't find it now) where US forces found 20 missiles capable of delivering WMD on the way to Bagdhad. Although it looks like they had no nuclear weapons, it also looks like all they needed was some fissible material, and they could have a bomb in a few months. A lot of Russian military grade material has turned up missing since the fall of the Iron Curtain. (An alarming fact that has more or less been swept under the carpet over the years.) It is easily concievable that Iraq might have, at some point, aquired some of it.

I don't believe Iraq had nuclear weapons....but they were very close to it. I'd be very interested in seeing the article/documents you speak of, Debbie. Could you post it please?

BTW, I read the copy of Senator Waxmans letter. It sounds to me like Bush may have been reaching for straws, but it doesn't sound like he "forged" this piece of evidence. Apparently the CIA has had this document since 2001, but didn't consider it reliable. It would be a real stretch to consider this a forgery.

Edited by: DreamTone7 at: 4/26/03 3:17:00 pm

debbie mannas · Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 1352

You really are brainwashed, and you haven't read any of the links I posted, if you did you wouldnt be making the statements you are and asking for more links..

I never said Bush "forged this piece of evidence". I said they USED forged documents and plagiarised material.

They knowingly used forged documents. Period. They knowingly used plagiarised documents. Period. How reliable is all their other "reliable information"???

And I've posted links to the articles, just above the Senator Waxman one. You just didnt read them.

As to the Alumium tubes... some more grasping at straws.

"The Niger documents marked the second time that ElBaradei has challenged evidence presented by the United States meant to illustrate Iraq's nuclear weapons program. He also rejected the U.S. position that aluminum tubes imported by Iraq were intended to make nuclear bombs.

ElBaradei has said his inspectors have found no evidence that Saddam has revived its nuclear weapons program."

www.kentucky.com/mld/kent...394313.htm

As to what El Baradei has said:

"In response to IAEA questioning, the Iraqi authorities indicated that unsuccessful attempts had been made in 2001 and 2002 to procure high-strength aluminium tubes in connection with a programme aimed at reverse engineering 81-millimetre rockets.

With a view to verifying information provided by Iraq on this issue, the IAEA has conducted a series of inspections at sites involved in the production and storage of reverse engineered rockets, held discussions with and interviewed Iraqi personnel, taken samples of aluminium tubes, and begun a review of the documentation provided by Iraq relating to contracts with the traders.

While the matter is still under investigation, and further verification is foreseen, the IAEA's analysis to date indicates that the specifications of the aluminium tubes sought by Iraq in 2001 and 2002 appear to be consistent with reverse engineering of rockets. While it would be possible to modify such tubes for the manufacture of centrifuges, they are not directly suitable for it."

www.iaea.or.at/worldatom/...n002.shtml

****************

All in all, they simply could not prove that Iraq was going to cause the immediate destruction of the world and could not afford to wait for the UN inspectors to irrefutable prove that they weren't - this would utterly destroy their chance to establish a neat base in a very STRATEGIC location indeed. So they used all means to convince their populations instead. Forgeries, emotional blackmail, heartstrings yada yada yada yada. It worked really good on you.

So Russian nuclear material is missing. No proof where it is, but it MIGHT be in Iraq, so let's attack... is that how it works? What a piece of conjecture. And this from a person who requires "proof" that DU is dangerous when even his own govt admits it.

Edited by: debbie mannas at: 4/26/03 5:04:56 pm

DreamTone7 · Joined: 20 Sep 2002 Posts: 2571

Oh, Debbie....I never said missing Russian Uranium was a justification for going into Iraq. I also have stated that there are many reasons we went in.......in my opinion, some were justified and some were not. (I reserve the right to determine what is justified and what is not.......not the UN, not the government, nor you! It's called freedom of choice....a benefit of living in a Democracy.)

However, I did read your links, and saw nowhere mention that this document was "forged" by anyone! It was simply noted as unreliable by the CIA. This means it may have been forged.....or not. We don't know. It is suspect (in my opinion) because it was written on paper not to be used (in theory) for the past ten years by the current government. (We were never told for sure whether or not it is still actually being used.....this happens a lot in real life.) As far as "plagiarised" goes, I don't think you understand the definition of that word based on the way you have used it several times now. Please look it up to be sure you are using it correctly.

The link I was wondering about (in case I was not clear) was the actual "forged" (in your words) document itself. I didn't see a copy of that anywhere in the links you posted.

debbie mannas · Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 1352

text from the link I posted:

"Sources familiar with the FORGERY investigation described the FAKED evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger.

The documents had been given to the UN inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by US intelligence. The FORGERS had made relatively crude errors - including names and titles that did not match with the individuals who held office at the time the LETTERS were purportedly written, the officials said. "We fell for it," said one US official who reviewed the DOCUMENTS."

**********************

Here's some more:

"The FBI is looking into the FORGERY of a key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program, including the possibility that a foreign government is using a deception campaign to foster support for military action against Iraq."

www.washingtonpost.com/ac...Found=true

What are you trying to say? That despite all the evidence and the fact the CIA and FBI accepted these documents as forgeries, they are still NOT?

**************

You want more FORGERY words? Do a google search: iraqi nuclear intelligence forgeries

DOWNING STREET USED A PLAGIARISED DOCUMENT (I think I'm going to have to used caps on everything now just so you read it).

Downing Street ADMITTED PLAGIARISING THE DOCUMENT IN THEIR DOSSIER WHICH COLIN POWELL HAILED AT THE UN.

"It took them nearly 24 hours, but Downing Street has been forced to admit it made a mistake with an intelligence dossier released on Monday.

A spokesman confessed that it should have credited the authors of the articles it used in the document, particularly Ibrahim Al Marashi - he's the graduate student whose thesis was copied -- grammatical errors and all. "

www.channel4.com/news/200...ssier.html

Want to see some of the comparisons?

"But it made familiar reading to Cambridge academic Glen Rangwala. It was copied from an article last September in a small journal: the Middle East Review of International Affairs.

It's author, Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student from Monterey in California. Large sections do indeed appear, verbatim.

A section, for example, six paragraphs long, on Saddam's Special Security Organisation, the exact same words are in the Californian student's paper.

In several places Downing Street edits the originals to make more sinister reading.

Number 10 says the Mukhabarat - the main intelligence agency - is "spying on foreign embassies in Iraq".

The original reads: "monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq."

And the provocative role of "supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes" has a weaker, political context in the original: "aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes."

Even typographic mistakes in the original articles are repeated.

Of military intelligence, al-Marashi writes in his original paper:

"The head of military intelligence generally did not have to be a relative of Saddam's immediate family, nor a Tikriti. Saddam appointed, Sabir Abd Al-Aziz Al-Duri as head..." Note the comma after appointed.

Downing Street paraphrases the first sentence: "Saddam appointed, Sabir 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Duri as head during the 1991 Gulf War."

This second line is cut and pasted, complete with the same grammatical error.

plagiarism is regarded as intellectual theft. "

www.channel4.com/news/200...ssier.html

This was the dossier that Colin Powell kept selling to the public.

"Colin Powell’s much trumpeted dossier on Iraq is a product of copy-and-paste-type intelligence operatives of United States who prepared the dossier from copying pages and pages from mainly three research papers and articles. One of these research papers was written by a student in California and was published by Middle East Review of International Affairs last year, reports leading TV news channel, Channel 4. "

foi.missouri.edu/polinfop...ingst.html

debbie mannas · Joined: 30 Sep 2002 Posts: 1352

I think you should change your underblurb.

"he that has eyes, let him read"