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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RMF who wrote (803261)	8/22/2014 12:51:58 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578260

>> Things WERE trumped up. Things were wrong, no doubt. But "trumped up" is simply not a factual statement. We've been over this before, and the facts simply aren't consistent with "trumped up". The aluminum tubes, for example, WERE banned, and Colin Powell, before the UNSC, opted for total disclosure: "By now, just about everyone has heard of these tubes, and we all know that there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these tubes are for. Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Other experts, and the Iraqis themselves, argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher. Let me tell you what is not controversial about these tubes. First, all the experts who have analyzed the tubes in our possession agree that they can be adapted for centrifuge use. Second, Iraq had no business buying them for any purpose. They are banned for Iraq. I am no expert on centrifuge tubes, but just as an old Army trooper, I can tell you a couple of things: First, it strikes me as quite odd that these tubes are manufactured to a tolerance that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets. Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do, but I don't think so." There is not one false implication in that statement. And the truth is we'll never know what the intent for them was. The argument put forth by DOE was that these tubes were a different size from the ones Saddam was using in 1990, and therefore probably weren't destined for nuclear enrichment applications. That's a lousier argument than the one put forth by the administration. Yes, the intel was lousy, but it wasn't just OUR intel. The administration (Bush's and Clinton's) had had every reason to believe Saddam was interested in moving back toward nuclear weapons. And it is worth noting that Hans Blix himself stated, in his contemporaneous account (his book), that WMDs would be found, if only he were given more time. (Blix only changed his story after it became popular to do so, like the Democrats did). You're free, of course, to believe as you will. But it is clearly and demonstrably a mis-statement to claim it was "trumped up". It certainly was a mistake to have promoted the decision based on WMDs alone when there were plenty of good reasons we had to go to Iraq. The one thing we can't know is what Iraq would look like today had Saddam not been removed. It is easy to say, "Oh, look how bad it is, it couldn't possibly have been worse." But of course it could; we just conveniently ignore that fact sometimes.

To: RMF who wrote (803261)	8/22/2014 6:48:45 AM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation Recommended By FJB Respond to of 1578260

obama got that reporter killed with his failed rescue attempt, just like Carter, incompetent. And he got our informants killed. He got the info where the americans were and waited over a week to move on it, of course they were gone, they get moved around after a few days. Obama is useless