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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (63913)	10/29/2004 12:05:52 PM
From: Mannie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Thank you for that article, that is right on the money. Orwell was a visionary genius.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (63913)	10/29/2004 12:25:23 PM
From: mistermj	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

>>Orwell understood that social pressures can be arranged so that falsehood rather than truth will emerge<< Bingo! This explains exactly what we are seeing in todays left wing media. Forged documents presented by CBS as evidence. The N.Y.Times leads with a headline to defend them..."Fake but Accurate" Blaming Bush for missing explosives before anyone has the facts. Bogus studies by "scientists" claiming 100,000 Iraqi deaths. Junk science and peer pressure passed off as scientific consensus on "Global Warming". Science of course is not about consensus. "Science" has now been hijacked for political agenda and presented as if it can't be debated, because it is presented as "Science". Orchestrated attacks on Bush during the last week of the U.S. election coordinated between various left wing institutions and media on a global scale. Orwellian indeed.

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (63913)	10/29/2004 12:29:50 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Bush's Excuse: The Dog Ate My Homework The Bush administration insists that they have no culpubility for the missing 350+ tons of dangerous explosives. As Josh [Marshall] has shown, as they try to address the questions about why they didn't do anything about al Qaqaa, they keep finding new excuses for why it wasn't their fault. Even more pathetically they say the dangerous explosives were removed from Iraq before the fall of Baghdad on April 9th. With the discovery of the video from April 18, 2003 by the embedded ABC team shows that the Bush spin machine has been hit with a heavy backwash. The damning piece of that video was that it showed that the explosives at al Qaqaa were intact nine days after the fall of Baghdad - the day that the US became legally responsible for Iraq as the occupying power. David Kay, who was sent into Iraq by the Bush administration to search for WMD, said that the failure of not providing security after the invasion led to a country awash in dangerous weapons. What makes this so damning for the Bush administration? The Bush administration was responsible for the security of Iraq as soon as American troops assumed power after the collapse of Saddam's government in Baghdad. Al Qaqaa was a known munitions dump since 1991. This is why Guiliani's smear about the troops not searching hard enough was even more offensive. There was no need to "search" for this munitions dump, as it had been known since 1991 and the location and extent of the highly dangerous materials had been thoroughly documented. (Certainly, the soldiers in Iraq were never told that it was important to secure this site.) The Bush administration was explicitly informed about the inventory at Al Qaqaa before the war and again shortly after the fall of Baghdad when the looting of Tuwaitha was reported. The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told U.S. officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. Despite the fact that the administration was informed of the need to safeguard the site, the entire contents of the site were stripped and carried off while the US was responsible for the site. Before the 2003 invasion, Bush cited a number of other ''dual use'' items -- including tubes that the administration contended could be converted to use for the nuclear program -- as a justification for invading Iraq. After the invasion, when widespread looting began in Iraq, the international weapons experts grew concerned that the Qaqaa stockpile could fall into unfriendly hands. In May, an internal memorandum at the energy agency warned that terrorists might be helping "themselves to the greatest explosives bonanza in history." ...The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under U.S. military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. U.N. weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the U.S. invasion last year. The looting lasted for months as entire buildings were carted off, all while the US-backed CPA was in charge of the country. "This process carried on at least through 2003 ... and probably into 2004, at least in early 2004," said a Western diplomat close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitored Iraq's nuclear sites before last year's war. ... They said the removal of the dual-use equipment -- which before the war was tagged and closely monitored by the IAEA to ensure it was not being used in a weapons program -- was planned and executed by people who knew what they were doing. ... "We're talking about dozens of sites being dismantled," a diplomat said on condition of anonymity. "Large numbers of buildings taken down, warehouses were emptied and removed. This would require heavy machinery, demolition equipment. This is not something that you'd do overnight." (via Seeing the Forest) What does one say about an administration that is responsible for safeguarding a country they have invaded, who has been warned that there are extremely dangerous munitions that need to be guarded, and yet does nothing to address this problem for months? The only conclusion is that this administration is fatally incompetent as well as indifferent to the needs of the country and the troops that they sent to war who are now facing an insurgency armed with munitions carelessly left unguarded. Bush must go. theleftcoaster.com

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (63913)	10/31/2004 8:01:56 PM
From: Rarebird	Respond to of 89467

<The power of the state to prevent independent thought is Orwell's true subject.> What most Americans to this day do not understand is that the nature of the state is POWER. The state is an economic dependent upon civil society. The State is courts and jails, regulatory agencies and rules that people in civil society must comply with in order to stay clear of the courts, fines and jail. The state is taxes and imposts. It gives "permissions" which must be obtained before one can do things on one's own private property. The state is the men with guns, hired by the state, whether they are American soldiers in Iraq or police officers in a small town in America. The state and all its dependents (employees) are direct dependents of civil society. In general, an employee of the state can improve his or her economic situation by getting promoted higher up in the government organization they are in. The best way to do that is to figure out something else that their particular department can do, something which will expand its personnel, its reach and range of activities and first and foremost, its annual BUDGET. As a consequence of this push by almost ALL state employees, civil society is in continual retreat, personal freedoms are diminished, taxes are increased.