Apparently there's still some independent journalists out there who weren't bought and sold by the Pentagon...

There's more people at an Expos game

Darn. I knew we should have blown the Palestine Hotel up when we had the chance.

You know, that whole WW2 iwo jima(sp) raising of the flag was sorta shitty too, i mean, what, there were only maybe a couple of troops there...

Considering you try to downplay the first real event of the war that all the media had to report, even al jazeers... where they couldnt taint what was actually happening... it's called symbolism.

That famous picture at Iowa Jima? Staged.

The statue toppling? Stage-managed.

What on earth are you babbling about? The picture totally knocks the wind out of the breathless, over-heated hype on the usual propaganda channels that made it seem like it was a crowd as big as, say, a Lakers championship parade that was involved. In fact, it looks kind of pitiful, like a crowd that greets the plane of a team that's lost the championship at 4:00 am. Spin is spin is spin is.......

It IS a nice symbolic gesture; not quite as stirring as the Berlin Wall falling, but still. I don't think any one image of the statue toppling will enter the popular inconography though.

[ April 10, 2003, 04:33 PM: Message edited by: Jim Allen ]

How long before that image appears on a postage stamp?

What do laker fans and Iraqi's have in common? they both riot and loot.

Actually, I think that was Ump25 and William who were in Iraq.

I wonder just how many Bush haters here will come back after all the illegal weapons have finally been revealed? I'd bet a ton of money that the answer is zero.

You are naive, fantomas, if you believe in three weeks we will have found 100% of Saddam's banned weapons. First of all, it now seems that Syria has taken possession of some stuff after it was transported there prior to the March 19 start of the war. Secondly, there now has been found banned nuclear ingredients, a mobile chemical weapons van, underground laboratories that were used for WMD manufacturing--and this is just a start.

No matter. Bush lied, because...well...he's Bush, and nothing he says can be true; and the Left hates him as stupidly as the right hated Clinton.

You people will go to your frickin' graves before you ever admitted someone you virulently despise was correct.

This partisanship-turned hatred (again, on either side) is pathetic.

[ April 10, 2003, 09:39 PM: Message edited by: MIB ]

Proof of this, please! Just because Cheney and Rumsfeld or Fox News utter it doesn't make it true. Where was this "chemical mobile van"? Where were these underground labs? Was ANY of this NEW information that the weapons inspectors had not visited or identified before? In fact several of the sites cited by the U.S. so far HAD BEEN VISITED and noted by the inspectors. Also, given the superior intelilgence we had (and have, as demonstrated by our precision bombing of high level targets), wouldn't we have been able to identify the new WMD labs, etc., in advance?

Then we're on to Syria. Are you so blind that you don't see that Wolfowitz, Perle and others have ALREADY IDENTIFIED SYRIA as the next target??? In the paper just the other day, Rumsfeld supposedly mentioned Syria as a target and Bush concurred! So are we now going to use the pretext of Syria's complicity to invade them too? Where will it end?

Also, if we had all this info, WHY DID WE HAVE TO USE PLAGIARIZED OR FORGED DOCUMENTS??? Answer that? Again, I would believe this president if he told the truth. But he hasn't. He has changed course repeatedly, and is never held accountable. I witnessed what the last congenital liar went through, and got sick of him and his tales, so I'm not going to sit by and allow this one to do the same thing without being nauseated by it.

You may say all you want about people disliking Bush, and some here may paint this as an anti-Republican sentiment, but I'll say this. I have no problem with an honest Republican in the White House. If she or he were a right-winger, yes, I'd disagree, but I'd still respect that person. But this man has a track record of lies and deceit that in 3 years matches that of the preceding liar. Defend him all you want. I'm glad the military has toppled Saddam. I just wish that we as Americans had been given the truth--that we wanted him out at any cost and had no pretext but that, to GET RID OF HIM--rather than the elaborate shadowplay of half-truths and dissimulations we were repeatedly offered up.

IF THEY FIND WMDs IN THE FORM AND AT THE LEVEL THAT WERE CITED AS A PRETEXT TO INITIATE THIS WAR, then I will say right away, as I have before, okay, W. was right, and though he went about the whole WMDs issue sloppily, he deserves credit. But given the way HE and others in his administration described Saddam's capabilities--I mean, come on, we were supposed to be hit by these weapons, THANK GOD they never turned up, etc.--I think he's got some explaining to do. Or whoever cooked that part of the story up.

I don't hate W. at all, I pity him. And partisanship implies ideological adherence, which I think is coming from you. There are at least 40 Republicans--not all of them ultraliberals, either--I'd support as our Commander in Chief, but I am not going to surrender to a personality cult, especially after I witnessed the damage that Right Wing caused from 1992-2000. I am very glad Saddam is no longer running Baghdad, and if he was there as recently as Wednesday, I hope our soldiers, Iraqis, the Kurds, SOMEONE finds him--and someone in Afghanistan finds that other ghoul, Osama--and takes them out. I want the war to be over, and I want this president to do the other aspect of his job, which is to deal with domestic affairs. No slogans, no turning things over to churches, no politicking only for the superrich. We've lost 2 million jobs, our economy is stagnant, crime is rising, our schools are seriously underfunded, we still have homeland security holes, the freaking INS or its new version can't even find hundreds of Middle Eastern students, and on and on. W. needs to deal with some of this; or find someone who is willing to.

A woman president? whewwwwwww LOL we'd invade someone once a month!

It is rather interesting how there are more and more little sound blurbs on the news about Syria and Iran. As predicted by many experts out in the world, attention will have to be redirected to other nations "needing to learn the proper way of governing". I honestly have not seen one article about any banned materials being transported to Syria, so I am not sure where that came from other than being asserted by MIB.

I also just want to point out for yet another time that every assertion to-date that WMD evidence has been found has been very quickly nullified by experts. As posted on another thread, the whole nuclear materials thing turned out to be the Marines breaking into a UN secured site. The "banned materials" turned out to be things the IAEA had sealed off for safe-keeping long ago.

Interesting that we are now in control of a large number of sites US "intelligence" had working knowledge of housing WMD programs. Not one real piece of evidence has turned up at any of them so far. There is plenty of time, however. I am sure we will dig up a few anthrax spores somewhere or other. After all, it does occur naturally as well as in manufactured form.

Also interesting how the Republican Guard commanders were given permission by Saddam to use WMD to attack the US troops (clearly stated by the administration), but we have found nothing after overruning pretty much every unit in the field.

Not trying to claim Iraq had nothing to hide, just trying to point out in a reasonable and logical manner that the levels of weapons activity claimed would mean that we were finding the stuff everywhere. And if the Iraqi command and control regime was as despotic as we know they were, do any of us honestly believe that at least one commander would not use the stuff? I think this is what is known as a "breach of logic".

Perhaps the partisanship is not on the side of the argument that is calling for a more honest account of the facts. After all, we do have the majority of the world on our side of the fence. It is a rather small minority (overall) who does not want to face the possibility that they have hitched a ride on a train that has jumped the tracks.

Its exact location I don't know, but it was shown on CNN earlier Thursday. Of course, I'm sure it was another Bush lie.

BTW, your own credibility is lessened even more by such ridiculous allusions to FOX News or Cheney. To so casually dismiss something just because FOX News reports it only shows your illogical bias even more. If FOX News said the Earth was round, you'd jump on them claiming it wasn't, simply because FOX News reported it.

I watch FNC, CNN, MSNBC, and others to get different perspectives, but I sure don't blow one off because I'm under some paranoid or conspiratorial belief that it's a mouthpiece for one ideology or another.

[ April 11, 2003, 12:45 AM: Message edited by: MIB ]

Thank you, Charlie.

As I said, proof please, MIB.

Because remember, these WMDs were an "immediate" threat. W. said this so often--in front of the UN, the Congress, everywhere he could--that certainly we should be finding them in readily weaponized version. I don't mean what the UN already turned up, or small storehouses, but the "immediate" threat he claimed. Is that so hard to understand???

Wow, what a spectrum! Peas in the same deferential pod, on bended knee to Washington.

[ April 11, 2003, 08:59 AM: Message edited by: Bill W ]

I beg to differ in your equation of CNN as being servile to Washington.

Update on Ali Ismaeel Abbas.

\"Why? Why did this happen to me?\"

I got the link from Alex Jones, of course.

Still no Al-Qaeda links, nor the massive caches of the "14,000" WMDs. We have found lots of graves, but then even when the U.S. was dealing with Saddam openly, we knew he was murdering his own people AND the Kurds.

Here's a provocative column from Ted Rall; he broaches the issue some in the Middle East have about those "celebrators" who tore down the Saddam statue. I still believe they were genuine Iraqi citizens, but he begs to differ.

Ted Rall: How We Lost the Iraq War

What troubles and worries me is now the growing number of Iraquis who want us out and now. Overall I have been disappointed in the lack of celebrations, and appreciations for what we did over there.

I hate to shine sunlight on your rainy parade, but ... a couple thousand Shiites marching in the South for the U.S. to leave so that they can create a theocratic state a la Iran? A couple of thousand Sunni marching in Baghdad for solidarity with the Shiites (because the Sunnis know their dominance over Iraq is about to end). Y'know what that is? It's called freedom. Here's a quote from washingtonpost.com about the Sunni march:
(Full article: Sunnis in Iraq Protest U.S. Occupation )

The news is: so few demonstrations. So few demands for the Coalition of the Willing to stop being so willing. The general cooperation and rapport between the U.S. military and the Iraqi civilian population remains high. There have been very incidents of friction reported ... despite a few protests, whether it be from a theocratic minority of Shiites or from Sunnis who perceive their day has ended.

Keep in mind that most of the Saddamites melted back into the civilian population. Keep in mind that left plenty of Saddam supporters to stir up problems. And the media -- U.S., European, and Arab -- are going to give major coverage to the few protests.

Yes Folks, the "clerics" want us out of Iraq, thats like saying the Rev. Phelps is marching in D.C., Iraq has their religous right just like we do, doesn't make it RIGHT though!