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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: ManyMoose who wrote (333762)12/25/2002 11:13:48 PM
From: sandintoes  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 769667
 
Saddam, in Christmas Message, Says Iraqis Seek 'Martyrdom'

Wednesday, December 25, 2002

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Saddam Hussein welcomed Christmas with an angry speech saying Iraqis were for "martyrdom," while U.N. inspectors spent the holiday trying to determine whether the Iraqi president is hiding nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

Inspections Wednesday took U.N. teams to a gas laboratory and a grain storage area in al-Taji, a vast complex that has attracted U.N. attention in the past. The International Atomic Energy Agency has linked al-Taji to Iraq's nuclear weapons program.

In an address read by a state television announcer to mark Christmas Eve, Saddam again rejected U.S. and British claims that his regime possesses weapons of mass destruction. He also said he wanted to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors.

"We are confident that the outcome of the inspection operations will be a big shock to the United States and will expose all the American lies if things remain on a technical and professional course with no hidden agendas," he said.

Saddam said the world was entering a new year "under unique circumstances ... which have been manufactured by the forces of evil and darkness in order to create a situation of instability, chaos and tension."

Saddam said the United States and its Zionist ally -- meaning Israel -- were bent on waging war against Iraq in a first step to spread their "hegemony ... across the world and control fortunes and future" of other countries.


"As much as Iraq loves life, its people are ready for martyrdom in the defense of its land and air space, its sanctities and future," Saddam's statement said.

"The road to deter the injustice, aggression and wickedness of the evil-minded is the road of jihad (holy war) and struggle," the statement said.

While Saddam spoke of war, about 120 people, including Iraqi Christians and American peace activists, prayed for peace at St. Rafael's Catholic Church in downtown Baghdad on Christmas Eve.

With fears building that America will wage war on Iraq, members of the U.S. and British-based Iraq Peace Team have traveled to Baghdad to call for a peaceful solution to the crisis and the lifting of harsh economic sanctions imposed on Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War.

"Of course I'm afraid, but I'll pray for peace," 12-year-old Zeina Shamuel told The Associated Press at St. Rafael's as worshippers sang in Arabic: "The people living in the night, will see the long awaited light."

Christians represent about 5 percent of Iraq's 22 million population and live mainly in Baghdad and the north. Iraq is predominantly Muslim and officially secular.

The United States and Britain have threatened war to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's most comprehensive attempt to rebut claims it has nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, a declaration to the United Nations earlier this month, has been dismissed as pages of lies by London and Washington. The top U.N. inspector has said it is largely a rehash of old information.

An Iraqi scientist interviewed by U.N. inspectors Tuesday said Baghdad is not hiding any weapons of mass destruction.

Sabah Abdel-Nour, who worked in a nuclear program Iraq says is now closed down, refused to be quizzed in private, telling U.N. inspectors that he wanted Iraqi officials present during the interview.

Speaking to reporters later at Baghdad's University of Technology, where he is a professor, Abdel-Nour said the U.N. inspectors were objective and friendly and their "questions were mainly about what has been done or any progress which has been achieved in Iraq since 1998."

Wednesday, inspectors were back at al-Taji, which they have visited at least twice earlier this month. On Dec. 16, a team examining Iraq's ballistic missile capabilities went to the al-Taji fiberglass production plant, which has become part of the Thaat Al Sawary plant. On Dec. 19, inspectors went to al-Hareth in al-Taji, a site that Iraq maintains is a food warehouse but U.S. officials have claimed may be a biological weapons facility.

In its report on inspections in Iraq in the 1990s, the International Atomic Energy Agency said al-Taji was the planned site of a gas centrifuge program used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

The previous round of U.N. inspections in the 1990s led to destruction of tons of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons, and to dismantlement of Iraq's program to try to build atomic bombs. That monitoring regime broke down in 1998 amid U.N.-Iraqi disputes and the inspectors now in Iraq are the first to work here in four years.

Sites visited Wednesday also included the Ibn Al-Haitham Company, identified in a British dossier on Iraq as a chemical weapons site.



To: ManyMoose who wrote (333762)12/26/2002 4:00:50 AM
From: A. Geiche  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 769667
 
"The U.S. is doing something about [the evil]"

You think I expected any sensible reply from you, the bunch
of brainwashed chauvinists? But from the most educated, most moral and civilised people, I always have heard only that U.S. is busily corrupting the world, exporting the evil. Since the dawn of the civilization, the main trend in its development was the abolishment of "using," i.e. of exploitation, of one human being by another and the perfection of cooperation between people, goodness, kindness, compassion to others. While hypocritically, for the show, you all are for this trend and its high principles -- in reality, they were the very main targets of your dirty “cold war” against all the nations that were rising from hell and trying to develop highly conscientious, self-sustaining societies. It was easy war for you. You easily countered those noblest difficult efforts (and at the same time corrupted your own youth) with the marasmus of your cult of self-centrism and perfidy and your American F--K YOU attitude -- the crown of your glorious culture. Instead of enlightening of the conscience, all your efforts through your “cold war” till now was, and is, to corrupt and rot it. No where else in the world the true kindness to others is the most dangerous demeanor as here (although, granted, you succeeded well with the contamination and corruption of most other nations). The goodness and a fair, unselfish help is regarded here as the most riskiest foolishness, for it is punished, for to take advantage of other people fairness is the most normal and natural here. What is the name for one who is perfidiously “taking advantage” of fairness of another person? In other cultures, this name is “scoundrel”. But in your culture, the noble, kind, fair, trusting people are contemptible “suckers”, and the stealing a candy from these "naive babies" is not only the most proper and natural act for an American but a virtue. It is this together with the perverted art and the death and violence that you were, and are, busily exporting to all "four corners" of the Earth, corrupting and destabilizing nations, in order to dominate, control and exploit them. And this is what your influence over other countries is all about. It is not any philanthropy and altruism but the cold blooded unscrupulous business American style.

Your chauvinistic pride is despicable, for you are deprived of truth. You are fed only with lie and half-truth, the worse sort of mis- and disinformation. As David Pearson wrote in his
KAL 007: THE COVER UP, Chapter 16, “To an unprecedented degree, the ‘night and cloud’ of government secrecy has been extended to new areas of American life. . . . As Anthony Marro wrote, “Washington reporters over the years have had to deal with steady barrage of deception, half-truths, and outright lies.” Under the present Administration, repeated, egregious “misstatements” by officials from the President (your teflon Reagan) himself on down have become norm. Selective truths are offered up, apparently to help to explain reality but in fact with opposite intention, and the public is left to draw obvious, and incorrect, conclusions from them. Other information is omitted entirely, perverting the information that is provided by modifying its context and weakening the reporters ability to reason effectively. Lying has become institutionalized through a deliberate policy of disinformation – putting knowingly false information into the public domain . . . . . .
. . . Concerns such as responsible, accountable government and the public’s right to know are believed by the new realists to be holdover from the earlier naive era that has vanished forever.
In their place has been construed a new set of values more consonant with the demands of the power structure. . . Instead, the press give free rein to the Administration.”


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