[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
The majority of the criticism Bush receives around here revolves around some ridiculously silly claims.
For a refresher, read nearly anything posted by JTF.[/quote]
Or for anybody else who thinks my opinions are idiotic for that matter… If this “war on terror” is such a resounding SUCCESS, why don’t you enlighten us ALL as to how many arrests and convictions have been made in connection to 9/11? While your at it tell us how many Iraqi hijackers there were.
You’d like to think I’m ridiculous by posting the things I do, all the while high-fiving each other for the successes in Iraq…
So this recent election - this makes success #5 thereabouts? What happened to all the other “successes”? Let’s talk about Fallujah for one - that was a big success right? Remember? Where are all the pictures of Fallujah BTW? Do you have any idea what we did to Fallujah? I do.
Shhhh, let’s not talk about that.
You think Iraqis just love us because of this election, not realizing they voted so we would LEAVE. In fact they voted overwhelmingly for the exact opposite of our version of a democratic government.
Sorry George, but Iraq has given you the purple finger
The party likely to win the election opposes the US presence and policies
Naomi Klein
Saturday February 12, 2005
The Guardian
'The Iraqi people gave America the biggest thank you in the best way we could have hoped for." Reading this election analysis from Betsy Hart, a columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service, I found myself thinking about my late grandmother.
Half blind and a menace behind the wheel of her Chevrolet, she adamantly refused to surrender her car keys. She was convinced that everywhere she drove (flattening the house pets of Philadelphia along the way), people were waving and smiling at her. “They are so friendly!” We had to break the bad news. “They aren’t waving with their whole hand, grandma - just with their middle finger.”
Imagine Fallujah being to Muslims what Rome and the Vatican are to Catholics… they love us alright, keep telling yourself that. You guys sound so ridiculous talking about how the “liberal media” only talk about the “bad news” in Iraq… you don’t have a fucking CLUE.
US massacres civilians in Fallujah
WSWS
10 November 2004
The world may never know exactly how many Iraqis are being murdered or maimed in Fallujah. The Pentagon does not bother to count its victims and has imposed a regime of strict censorship, abetted by the self-enforcement of the corporate media. However, from the few reports coming out of the besieged city, it is absolutely clear that the basic purpose of the US campaign is to reduce it to rubble, killing and terrorizing as many inhabitants as possible.
Residential buildings, hospitals and mosques have all been bombed, and American troops are engaging in a house-to-house search of whatever remains. Tens of thousands of civilians remain in Fallujah, a medium-sized city near Baghdad that is normally home to 300,000 people.
Film reveals true destruction to ghost city Falluja
Baghdad
January 11, 2005
The Guardian
Fresh evidence has emerged of the extent of destruction and appalling conditions in Falluja, still deserted two months after a major US offensive against the insurgent stronghold.
Ali Fadhil, an Iraqi journalist working with the Guardian’s film unit and one of the few reporters to travel independently to Falluja, describes in a Channel 4 News film tonight a “city of ghosts” where dogs feed on uncollected corpses.
In interviews, insurgents challenge official US accounts of a decisive victory and claim many of the rebels left the city in a pre-planned withdrawal.
“It is completely devastated,” Fadhil writes in the Guardian today. “Falluja used to be a modern city; now there is nothing. We spend that first day going through the rubble that had been the centre of the city; I don’t see a single building that is functioning.”
US commanders claimed to have killed more than 1,200 insurgents in the November battle, dealing a serious blow to the insurgency. Before the assault, Falluja was a no-go area for the US and Iraqi military.
But in a graveyard, known as the “martyrs cemetery”, Fadhil counts only 76 graves. In houses he finds other bodies he suspects were civilians.
“I saw other rotting bodies that showed no sign of being fighters. In one house in the market there were four bodies inside the guestroom,” he writes. “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.”
The allegations were put to US forces in Baghdad five days ago. There has been no reply.
Despite the intense fight in Falluja, the insurgency has gathered pace across Iraq, particularly in the northern city of Mosul, once a model of peace and calm, and in Baghdad, where the deputy police chief was assassinated yesterday.
US commanders thought the rebels had been surrounded in Falluja. Yet one fighter tells Fadhil his men left 10 days into the battle: “We did not pull out because we did not want to fight. We needed to regroup; it was a tactical move.”
Fallujah Video
http://www.journeyman.tv/?lid=18059&cc=1
Falluja Residents Testify to the Destruction of Their City
By Michel B’le-Richard
Le Monde
07 February 2005
Three months after the American offensive and capture of the Sunni bastion, barely 20% of the population has returned. Some residents survive in the ruins. The Red Crescent tries to help, while the Iraqi Army patrols and loots whatever remains.
Three months after the American offensive against Falluja that began November 8, 2004, the rebel city fifty kilometers west of Baghdad is devastated, emptied, sepulchral. “Like after an earthquake, a fire and bomb tsunami that spared practically nothing, not even the mosques,” relates Sheikh Taghlib Al-Alousi, President of the Chura, the assembly of religious dignitaries.
The city with a hundred mosques is now only a shadow of its former self. “It’s a tragedy! I cried about it like a child,” explains the official from the Hazrah Mohammedia mosque, who has returned to what was once a Sunni bastion three times in the period since the end of the main fighting in early December.
Tears come to his eyes when he evokes the present condition of this city of 400,000 on the banks of the Euphrates. “Practically not a single house has been spared. 20% of them have burned and at least 10% are totally destroyed,” asserts this engineer who denounces the massive American bombardments every time the Marines encountered any resistance.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/020705H.shtml
Democracy in Iraq
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/covering_iraq/archives//000191.php
BTW, Richard Perle called the Iraqi war illegal a long time ago.
War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal
November 20, 2003
The Guardian
International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: “I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.”
Also, I’m sure you heard about the finally released report Bush has been holding that states the FAA and the government had 52 warnings about bin Laden and al Qaida in 2001… right up to Sept 10, 2001. That means Condi lied under oath… Oh No!
Armed pilots banned 2 months before 9-11
FAA rescinded rule allowing guns in cockpits just before terror attacks
May 16, 2002
By Jon Dougherty
2002 WorldNetDaily.com
A 40-year-old Federal Aviation Administration rule that allowed commercial airline pilots to be armed was inexplicably rescinded two months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, leading aviation security experts to lay at least some of the blame for the tragedy at the feet of airlines, none of which took advantage of the privilege while it was in effect.
The FAA adopted the armed pilot rule shortly after the Cuban missile crisis of 1961 to help prevent hijackings of American airliners. It remained in effect for four decades.
But in July 2001 - just two months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks - the rule was rescinded.
http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27647
FBI Admits: No Evidence Links ‘Hijackers’ to 9-11
American Free Press
By Michael Collins Piper
After seven months of non-stop declarations by U.S. government spokesmen that there exists solid proof tying 19 Muslim men to plotting the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller has now admitted quite the opposite.
That 19 Muslim men who have apparently disappeared have been named as the hijackers is not in doubt.
What is in doubt is whether those 19 men were actually plotting anything, either individually or together.
The amazing possibility remains that others carried out the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, using the identities of the 19 Muslims who have been assigned guilt in the tragedy.
In an April 19 speech delivered to the Common wealth Club in San Francisco, Mueller said that the purported hijackers, in his words, ‘left no paper trial.’ The FBI director stated flatly:
In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper - either here in the United States or in the treasure trove of information that has turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere - that mentioned any aspect of the Sept. 11 plot.
In describing Mueller’s evidence fiasco, Los Angeles Times reporters Erich Lichtblau and Josh Meyer, whose article was reprinted in The Washington Post on April 30, note that:
Law enforcement officials say that while they have been able to reconstruct the movements of the hijackers before the attacks - all legal except for a few speeding tickets - they have found no evidence of their actual plotting.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/051302/FBI_Admits__No_Evidence_/fbi_admits__no_evidence_.html
Report cites warnings before 9/11
September 19, 2002
WASHINGTON (CNN) - U.S. intelligence officials had several warnings that terrorists might attack the United States on its home soil - even using airplanes as weapons - well before the September 11, 2001 attacks, two congressional committees said in a report released Wednesday.
In 1998, U.S. intelligence had information that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosives-laden airplane into the World Trade Center, according to a joint inquiry of the House and Senate intelligence committees.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/18/intelligence.hearings/
Bush asks Daschle to limit Sept. 11 probes
January 29, 2002
WASHINGTON (CNN) - President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, congressional and White House sources told CNN.
The request was made at a private meeting with congressional leaders Tuesday morning. Sources said Bush initiated the conversation.
He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry that some lawmakers have proposed, the sources said
Tuesday’s discussion followed a rare call to Daschle from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to make the same request.
“The vice president expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism,” Daschle told reporters.
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/01/29/inv.terror.probe/
So remember, tell us ALL (anybody) how many arrests and convictions have been made in connection to 9/11. (You know, the thing Bush would have moved “mountains” to stop.)
52 WARNINGS in the year leading up to 9/11 and for 1-1/2 hours the greatest military in the world is nowhere to be found.
So before, during and after 9/11 to the election in Iraq, this all constitutes one big success in the “war on terror” to you guys - yet you think I’m the one who doesn’t get it?
“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”