Tal's Iraq War: Blood for Oil, Oil for Food, Food for Thought

Dude I have already made you my offer, only $1 million of your eartj dollars for the anti-mind control laser helmet and cheap at the price I tell you. Buy a dozen and I throw in a magic carpet. you can;t ask better than that.

The link on Saddams Nuclear Programme allegedly contains reports by Charles Duelfer that Iraq had an active programme in 2003. However this directly contradicts reports by weapons inspectors such as Kay and Blix; the Washington Post reported that:

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But investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

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A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60340-2004Jan6

The "Iraq Failing to Disarm" link pioints to Coln Powells utterly discredited presentation to the UN. You will of course recall, Tall that the "evidence" offered there was so poor and circumstantial as to have persuaded nobody. A recording of two officers agreeing to have the term "nerve agents" removed from a set of protocols must of course be active concealment... unless they are removing it BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE ANY. Then of course there were the bowser type vehicles alleged to have contained chemicals - a report based on a single unconfirmed claim.

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The Stupid Army
Thair Anwar Masraf, an affable project engineer, made an appointment last summer to see an investigator from David Kay's survey group. He had information, he said in an interview, that might help the Americans interpret two trailer-mounted production plants found near Mosul in April and May.
"I waited more than one hour in the Palestine Hotel," Masraf said. "He did not show up."
Masraf watched with curiosity, in coming months, as the Bush administration touted its discovery of mobile germ-weapon factories.

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A joint study released May 28 by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency called the trailers "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." Two days later, in Poland, President Bush announced: "For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them."

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When Iraqi engineers told investigators that the discovered trailers were meant for hydrogen, the CIA dismissed the "cover story."

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By July, with contrary evidence piling up, Kay described the trailer episode as a "fiasco." He told BBC Television, which broadcast the tape Nov. 23: "I think it was premature and embarrassing."

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Even so, Kay's October report to Congress left the question unresolved. Kay said he could not corroborate a mobile germ factory, but he restated the CIA argument that the trailers were not "ideally suited" for hydrogen.

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Had Masraf found Kay's investigator at the Palestine Hotel, he said he would have explained that Iraq actually used such trailers to generate hydrogen during the eight-year war with Iran. Masraf and his former supervisor at the Saad Co. said Masraf managed a contract to refurbish some of the units beginning in 1997.

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According to the two men, Iraq bought mobile hydrogen generators from Britain in 1982 and mounted them on trucks. The Republican Guard used one type, Iraq's 2nd Army Corps another.

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Iraqi artillery units relied on hydrogen-filled weather balloons to measure wind and temperature, which affect targeting. Munqith Qaisi, then a senior manager at Saad Co. and now its American-appointed director-general, said the trailers used a chemical -- not biological -- process to make hydrogen from methanol and demineralized water.

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The feature that analysts found most suspicious in May -- the compression and recapture of exhaust gases -- is a necessity, Masraf said, when gas is the intended product.

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In the late 1990s, the Republican Guard sent some of its trailers for refurbishment at the Kindi Co. The 2nd Army Corps signed a similar contract with Saad Co. Masraf said the first units were finished in 2001, including the two discovered by coalition forces around Mosul.

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Qaisi's account may also clear up an unexplained detail from the May 28 intelligence report: traces of urea in the reaction vessel aboard one of the trailers. Qaisi said the vessels corroded badly because Iraqi troops disregarded strict orders to use only demineralized water.

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The stupid army pissed in it, or used river water," he said.

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So much for Powells credibility.

The link "Iraq has tons of chemical weapons" points to a document on CNN dated Sept 4 2002, rather behind the times and of course reflecting absolutely none of the information uncovered since. So the "tons" reported here are notional tons, speculated tons, not actual known tons. And in fact no such tons have been found or are likely to be found. The origin of the claim is analysis of DOCUMENTS indicating that Iraq imported such materials and yet they do not appear traceable in the weapons declarations. It is speculation, not evidence.Further more, mustard gas, VX and Sarin have only recently been termed weapons of MASS destruction, whereas previoously they had simply been described as chemical or biological agents. They are in purely utilitarian terms less massively destructive than a serious minefield. Any industrial nation with a medical system can produce them, and there is absolutely no possible use of them in any sort of ICBM or other long range device. As such they cannot possibly have presented a serious threat to the West or to Israel (and why should I care about Israel anyway?) and if this is the "WMD" that all the hoopla was about then clearly the whole argument was dishonest from the outset.--
Furthermore I caution against taking CNN at face value any more than Fox news - it is another ostentatiously pro-American broadcaster. In this article ist severely manipulates the facts to present a particular spin:

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U.N. arms inspectors were in Iraq more than seven years. Complaining that Iraq was uncooperative, they left in December 1998 on the eve of a U.S.-British bombing raid.

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In fact the Inpsectors were pulled out by Butler due to an imminent military strike by the US, and AGAINST the wishes of the UN security council. It is true that they had complained of lack of coopoeration, in that Iraq had accused the inspectors of including US spies among their number - something expressly forbidden in the agreements by which the inspectors were accepted. Rather than own up and play fair the US resorted to its usual response when it doesn't get its way, which is of course killing people. It then turns around and blames Iraq for the expulsion and the gullible public swallow it whole.The US press went on to play the incident down further, USAToday reporting that: "spying on Saddam Hussein is nothing new and nothing needing an apology." Except it most certainly IS worthy of an apology when you agreed specifically not to do so in order to get the inspectors in the first place; the US was quite plainly not acting in good faith. As we know now, this is becuase it was determined to go to war come hell or high water and regardless of the truth.And even beyond that we see in this article the cynical and opportunist linkage of Iraq with the anthrax powder scare in the US, cpnotributing yetb again to the false linkage between Iraq and terrorism in the minds of the gullible American public.This message has been edited by contracycle, 01-11-2005 06:21 AM

And as a small insight into the minset of the alleged "liberators, we find this little vignette reported after Falluja:

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Fallujans are suspicious of outsiders, so I found it surprising when Nihida Kadhim, a housewife, beckoned me into her home. She had just arrived back in the city to check out her house; the government had told the people three days earlier that they should start going home. She called me into her living room. On her mirror she pointed to a message that had been written in her lipstick. She couldn't read English. It said: "Fuck Iraq and every Iraqi in it!"

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"They are insulting me, aren't they?" she asked.

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City of ghosts | Iraq | The Guardian

And you have a problem with those protesters Tal? I was out there with similar posters - a million of us marched in London. It was the biggest demonstration in the cities history - bigger even than the Chartists and the Suffragists.Given that you apparently believe everything the president says without any thought or analysis, you suggesting protesters whose information was correct "mentally ill" really takes the cake. Don't blame us for the fact that you were lied to, son.Here are some posters friom the UK: http://www.adamnieman.co.uk/posters/#postersHeres even one from Vietnam Veterans Against The War. Surely you wouldn't call your own vets mentally ill? http://www.punchdown.org/rvb/F15/ChicagoIL.jpgIf you go back to http://www.punchdown.org/rvb/F15/ you can see snapshots of demo's from 133 events all around the world - including Tel Aviv: http://www.punchdown.org/rvb/F15/TelAviv.jpgRegardless, we see what hope Iraq can look forward to from the American occupation - what a farce it is that the very soldiers apparently bringing "dmeocracy" can say that those people who exercise their rights to protest are mentally ill. That dismissal of the democratic process and popular will is outright authoritarian.

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Where did he say that?

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Well quite clearly he is contemptuous of the mechanisms of democracy. Faced by widespread popular dissent, he resorts to character assasination and slander to dismiss then. That is directly anti-democratic - a democratically minded person would at least respect the difference of opinion. This guy does not.

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Do Al-Jazeera broadcast positive stories about the upcoming elections?

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Should they? It looks like its going to be a debacle.

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Do Fox broadcast the pictures of dead and maimed Iraqis following US bombings?

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No they don;t. But that said a lot of the criticism of AJ for braodcasting such images is silly and opportunistic - Arab world press as a whole is much less shy about showing real images of death than western media is. And I consdier that a weakenss of Western medi, as it tneds to create a consequence-free context in which violence is exercised.The allegation that AJ broadcasts such images as part of a purposefully anti-Western strategy is total rubbish.

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You are 100% incorrect. Sarin and Mustard HAVE ALREADY BEEN USED on US forces.

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According to who? In fact most of the commentary has been about the manifest failure of the Iraqi regulars, allegedly armed to the teeth with such chemical agents, to use these weapons in the face of US invasion. These are after all area-deniual weapons mostly suited to use on concentrations of troops. So WHERE and WHEN were these wespons used? Please support your claim.

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So how can you say there were no weapons? All of my WMD links happened.

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Easy - there were not weapons. If you claim there are weapons, can you tell me where they are please, and why your militarily has not yet seized them?Furthermore, its undountedly true those links "happened". But that does not mean they were not lies. Your government lied to you and the world - that is the reality you are desperate not to acknowledge.

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There's no debating that. There was 1.77 TONS of nuclear material moved from the Tuwaitha nulcear complex.

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Yes a very interesting case, that. Thwe two top theories are:
1) this was moved by iraqi rebels becuase the US was too busy securing the oil facilties they came for rather than being interested in the empty pretext they used to justify the war, or
2) it was spirited away by Americans because the material would have shown links incriminating America in the initial supply of nuclear materials. This is in line with the dog-n-pony show of Saddam's indictment in which no charges relating to the Iran-Iraq war wer mentioned, presumably because American fingerprints are all over that conflict.This message has been edited by contracycle, 01-12-2005 06:42 AM

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We are going in circles. Agree to Disagree. Next topic.

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We are not going in circles - you are simply unable ti substantiate or defend your position. But then I'm sure that as a Patriot mere facts do not get in thw way of killing people when the state orders you to do so, does it?How about you move on to the topic in which you explain why you are not fulfilling your "army values" of doing the right thing both legally and morally? You are engaged in an illegal occupation and criminal enterprise, and butchering people whose only crime is to have been attacked by you, many of them civilians. A reporter who visited Falluja recently reported that many of the dead they found had been shot down right insided their own door-ways, as if they had answered a knock on the door and been instantly gunned down.This is your "moral" army at work. How do you reconcile this with your "army values"?

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The insurgents (some foriegn, some former Bathists) are killing the Iraqi civillians.

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No, American troops are killing civilians, both purposefully and "accidentally", as in when you shell an inhabited city with no concern for the civilians therein. But there are in addition serious allegations of Marine snipers shooting civilians, and other reports such as four unarmed bodies found in a room in Falluja, no weapons present, apparently each shot while asleep from the window.You are killing civilians. The occupation is as bloodthirsty and brutal as any occupation has ever been. And what the freedom-loving people of the world look forward to is the liberation of Iraq from American occupation.

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My position (There are WMD in Iraq) is substantiated from multiple sources of Sarin, Mustard, and 1.7 tons of nuclear material.

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Except you cannot provide the slightest evidence that this is true, can you? the only evidence you have so far cited is the already discredit lies of the Bush administartion.

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You guys are ignoring the facts.

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You don't have any facts for us to ignore. On the other hand, you ARE ignioring the facts of the American occupation and the civilians it is killing.I would point out to you on3e fact you have not acknowledged, Tal: the protesters were right, weren't they? We "menatlly ill" people could see the "evidence" for WMD was paper thin and based on faith rather than fact. We knew the occupation would turn ugly becuase we knew you had no legitimacy in Iraqi eyes. And we knew of the US militaries serial contempt for civilian lives. After all, the US can't be bothered to count civilian deaths so it has no idea of whether it is is doing well or badly in its stated goals of minimising civilian casualties. Amercia has never cared about civilian deaths in any of its wars as far as anyone can tell.WE called it right. You and your bloodthirsty president were wrong.This message has been edited by contracycle, 01-12-2005 07:41 AM

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I am pretty sure there have been more brutal occupations than this one.

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There is no basis for that - becuase many other armies actually obey things like the geneva convention rather than suspending it at will. Many other armies also consider themselves to have a duty of care to the civilian population, while the US specifically does not track its impact on civilians. Furthermore we have indications of soldiers shooting civilians, racist abuse et al which indicates a contemptuous attitude to Iraqi's, treating them as less worthy of life.

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And for your information Tal is correct that insurgents are specifically killing Iraqi citizens in a campaign which is more brutal than our own methods and in some cases just as foreign borne.

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Evidence please? Of coruse there have been killings of collaboraters but as I have repeatedly pointed out that is not unusual for a state under occupation with an active resistance. There is no evidence at all of a sizable foreign contingent apart from the same semantic devices that Bush used to link Iraq and Al Qaeda. And lastly, I cannot see how the odd suicide bombing or punsihment execution can be see as remotely equivalent to the atrocity of Fallujah.

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Most Iraqis are more sick of the insurgents than the US occupation.

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What insurgents? You mean the IRAQI RESISTANCE. The residents of Fallujah blame Ayad Allawi and the US for their plight, by and large.

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After all the US forces did remove Hussein (which most did like), and the insurgents haven't done anything but kill them.

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You mean the RESISTANCE again. And I think you'll find that in all instances of resistance, they can only operate with broad popular consent to conceal them from the forces of occupation. They command much more support than opposition.This message has been edited by contracycle, 01-12-2005 07:50 AM

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These are all true, verified by more than one news source.

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Then why can you not provide any?

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Once again, the insurgents are killing the civillians.

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Are collaborators civilians? Are they not illegal combatants with no rights, out of uniform and engaged in combat operations? Hypocrite.

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Now you are showing your ignorance.

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Now you are showing your arrogance. I note you have failed to rebut a single one of my claims and simply resort to dogmatic assertion. You don't know what you are talking about do you, you just believe unashamedly in your own righteousness.Lets have a look at whats was found in Fallujaf, shall we, and then you can explain why the USA has failed to respond to any of these reports? I seems the resistacne withdrew from Falluja after only 10 days and that the majority of Iraqis killed in the city were probably civilians

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Some of the worst fighting took place here in the centre of the city, but there was no sign of the 1,200 to 1,600 fighters the Americans said they had killed. I had heard that there was a graveyard for the fighters somewhere in the city but people said that most of them had withdrawn from the city after the first week of fighting. I needed to find one of the insurgents to tell me the real story of what had happened in the city. The Americans had said that there had been a big military victory, but I couldn't understand where all the fighters were buried.

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After I saw the body I felt uncomfortable about sleeping in Falluja. The place was deserted and polluted with death and all kinds of weapons. Imagine sleeping in a place where any of the surrounding houses might have one, two or three bodies. I wanted out.

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We went back to my friend the old Republican guard officer. I was so tired I could hardly take my clothes off to go to sleep but I couldn't sleep with the smell of death on my clothes.

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December 26

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In the morning, I went back to find the cemetery and look for evidence of the fighters who had been killed. It was about 4pm before I got inside the martyrs' cemetery; people kept waylaying me, wanting to show me their destroyed houses and asking why the journalists didn't come and show what the Americans had done to Falluja. They were also angry at the interim President Allawi for sending in the mainly Shia National Guard to help the Americans.

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At the entrance to the fighters' graveyard a sign read: "This cemetery is being given by the people of Falluja to the heroic martyrs of the battle against the Americans and to the martyrs of the jihadi operations against the Americans, assigned and approved by the Mujahideen Shura council in Falluja."

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As I went into the graveyard, the bodies of two young men were arriving. The faces were rotting. The ambulance driver lifted the bones of one of the hands; the skin had rotted away. "God is the greatest. What kind of times are we living through that we are holding the bones and hands of our brothers?"

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Then he began cursing the National Guard, calling them even worse things than the Americans: "Those bastards, those sons of dogs." It wasn't the first time I had heard this. It was the National Guard the Americans used to search the houses; they were seen by the Fallujans as brutal stooges. Most of the volunteers for the National Guard are poor Shias from the south. They are jobless and desperate enough to volunteer for a job that makes them assassination targets. "National infidels", they were also called.

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I counted the graves: there were 74. The two young men made it 76. The names on the headstones were written in chalk and some had been washed away. One read: "Here lies the heroic Tunisian martyr who died", but I didn't see any other evidence of the hundreds of foreign fighters that the US had said were using Falluja as their headquarters. People told me there were some Yemenis and Saudis, some volunteers from Tunisia and Egypt, but most of the fighters were Fallujan. The US military say they have hundreds of bodies frozen in a potato chip factory 5km south of the city, but nobody has been allowed to go there in the past two months, including the Red Crescent.

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Salman Hashim was crying beside the grave of his son, who had been a fighter in Falluja.

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"He is 18 years old. He wanted to be a doctor or engineer after this year; it was his last year in high school." At the same grave, the boy's mother was crying and remembering her dead son, who was called Ahmed. "I blame Ayad Allawi. If I could I would cut his throat into pieces." Then, to the mound of earth covering her son's body, she said: "I told you those fighters would get you killed." The boy's father told her to be quiet in front of the camera.

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On the next grave was written the name of a woman called Harbyah. She had refused to leave the city for the camps with her family. One of her relatives was standing by her grave. He said that he found her dead in her bed with at least 20 bullets in her body.

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I saw other rotting bodies that showed no signs of being fighters. In one house in the market there were four bodies inside the guest room. One of the bodies had its chest and part of its stomach opened, as if the dogs had been eating it. The wrists were missing, the flesh of the arm was missing, and parts of the legs.

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I tried to figure out who these four men were. It was obvious which houses the fighters were in: they were totally destroyed. But in this house there were no bullets in the walls, just four dead men lying curled up beside each other, with bullet holes in the mosquito nets that covered the windows. It seemed to me as if they had been asleep and were shot through the windows. It is the young men of the family who are usually given the job of staying behind to guard the house. This is the way in Iraq - we never leave the house empty. The four men were sleeping the way we sleep when we have guests - we roll out the best carpet in the guest room and the men lie down beside each other.

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"Its Abu Faris's house. I think that the fat dead body belongs to his son, Faris," said Abu Salah, whose chip shop was also destroyed in the bombing.

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It was getting dark and it was time to go, but I needed some overview shots of the city. There was a half-built tower, so I climbed it and looked around. I couldn't see a single building that hadn't been hit.

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After a few minutes I got the sense that this wasn't a good place for me to be hanging around, but I had to pee urgently. I found a place on the roof of the building. While I was doing that a warning shot passed so close to my head that I ducked and didn't even wait to pull up my zip, but ran to the half-destroyed stairs to climb down the building. I felt as if the American sniper was playing with me; he had had plenty of time to kill me if he wanted to.

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Go on, murderer, explain it all away.This message has been edited by contracycle, 01-12-2005 08:03 AM

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Look at the links I posted earlier in the thread.

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What, the Collected Lies of George W. Bush Volumes 1 through 8? They have beedn discredited, rely on old reports that have been falsified, and are completely laced with faulty dogmatic assumptions. I HAVE looked at them and as holmeshas pointed out to you you don't even seem to undrestand they they don;t say what you seem to think they say.While you're at it you can also comment on these reports from Fallujah, seeing as you are so certain Americans are not killing civilians:

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By the time Menem Latif Hussain returned to his house early in the afternoon on the third day of the battle for Falluja there was little he could do. In the driveway by the front gate lay the body of his son Wisam, 16.

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The boy had suffered one injury, caused by a blow so powerful that the back of his skull had been torn away. It killed him instantly.

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"He had been standing by the gate looking out. There had been bombing nearby. I don't know whether it was a shell or a sniper that hit him," said Mr Hussain.

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"I gave my thanks to God, for he was a martyr. And then we buried him in the cemetery."

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When they returned to the house later that afternoon they found Wisam's cousin Thair Ahmed, 18, was also missing. He had left that morning to cross town to check on his fiancee's family. Hours later the family retrieved the young man's body from where it lay in the street. He had been hit once, by a sniper's bullet through the heart, and he too died where he fell. By then it was too dangerous to reach the cemetery.

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"We buried him in a patch of dirt ground. There was no choice. Later we will take out his body and bury him properly," said Mr Hussain, 41.

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They were not the only deaths he saw that week. From his driveway he saw a girl aged 18 standing at the gate of a house opposite shot dead by a sniper's bullet. Her brother-in-law rushed to help her, and he too was shot dead, Mr Hussain said.

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At another time a house at the end of his street suffered a direct hit from a powerful bomb. "We ran to the house because they were my friends. In the garden I saw three men had been sitting on a bench. They were all dead, they had been cut in half by the bomb. My wife went crazy," he said.

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A few days later, Mr Hussain fled Falluja with his wife and four surviving children and dozens of other families. They now live under canvas in an Iraqi Red Crescent camp in al-Khadra, western Baghdad.

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"We are peaceful people and they came and bombed us," Mr Hussain said yesterday. "From the start of the war it was just like hell. Why did they come and kill our sons?"

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This message has been edited by contracycle, 01-12-2005 08:07 AM