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

To: Ish who wrote (581507)	6/9/2004 5:28:21 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Yep, but that's about the same as saying "I did not have sexual relations with that woman". It might be sorta accurate, in a lawyer-like way... but the fact remains that they were not WHERE the Pentagon said they were, nor in the numbers they claimed. (In fact, practically in No numbers... the area of barren desert the Pentagon referred to did not have troops deployed to it... certainly not "250,000 troops and 1500 tanks"! :) It was disinformation, intended to secure Saudi cooperation (which it did), and Western cooperation (immediate threats to the oil, don't 'cha know), which it did. Only, it was rather juvenile to make up such a BIG whopper... and then forget that Soviet and French satellite imagery was commercially available! In any war, truth is the first victim. --- Ain't it always the case!

To: Ish who wrote (581507)	6/9/2004 9:29:20 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Respond to of 769670

re: " but Iraqi tanks all over Kuwait were no more than 5 hours from the boarder. Those around Al Kuwait were 2 hours from Saudi Arabia. " I think you've got some proofing to do.....you've got a tough pill to swallow. " Satellite photographs taken by the Soviet Union on the precise day Bush addressed Congress failed to show any evidence of Iraqi troops in Kuwait or massing along the Kuwait-Saudi Arabian border. While the Pentagon was claiming as many as 250,000 Iraqi troops in Kuwait, it refused to provide evidence that would contradict the Soviet satellite photos. U.S. forces, encampments, aircraft, camouflaged equipment dumps, staging areas and tracks across the desert can easily be seen. But as Peter Zimmerman, formerly of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Reagan Administration, and a former image specialist for the Defense Intelligence Agency, who analyzed the photographs said: “We didn't find anything of that sort [i.e. comparable to the U.S. buildup] anywhere in Kuwait. We don't see any tent cities, we don't see congregations of tanks, we can't see troop concentrations, and the main Kuwaiti air base appears deserted. It's five weeks after the invasion, and from what we can see, the Iraqi air force hasn't flown a single fighter to the most strategic air base in Kuwait. There is no infrastructure to support large numbers of people. They have to use toilets, or the functional equivalent. They have to have food.... But where is it?” On September 18, 1990, only a week after the Soviet photos were taken, the Pentagon was telling the American public that Iraqi forces in Kuwait had grown to 360,000 men and 2,800 tanks. But the photos of Kuwait do not show any tank tracks in southern Kuwait. They clearly do show tracks left by vehicles which serviced a large oil field, but no tank tracks. Heller concludes that as of January 6, 1991, the Pentagon had not provided the press or Congress with any proof at all for an early buildup of Iraqi troops in southern Kuwait that would suggest an imminent invasion of Saudi Arabia. The usual Pentagon evidence was little more than "trust me." But photos from Soviet commercial satellites tell quite a convincing story. Photos taken on August 8, 1990, of southern Kuwait - six days after the initial invasion and right at the moment Bush was telling the world of an impending invasion of Saudi Arabia - show light sand drifts over patches of roads leading from Kuwait City to the Saudi border. The photos taken on September 11, 1990, show exactly the same sand drifts but now larger and deeper, suggesting that they had built up naturally without the disturbance of traffic for a month. Roads in northern Saudi Arabia during this same period, in contrast, show no sand drifts at all, having been swept clean by heavy traffic of supply convoys. The former DIA analyst puts it this way: "In many places the sand goes on for 30 meters and more." Zimmerman's analysis is that "The [roads] could be passable by tank but not by personnel or supply vehicles. Yet there is no sign that tanks have used those roads. And there's no evidence of new roads being cut. By contrast, none of the roads in Saudi Arabia has any sand cover at all. They've all been swept clear.”