Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: longnshort who wrote (859880)	5/25/2015 2:19:51 PM
From: joseffy	1 Recommendation Recommended By FJB Respond to of 1576159

Memorializing Our Fallen in Ramadi ........................................................................ Flopping Aces ^ \| 05-25-15 \| Wordsmith Why Ramadi matters: The fall of Ramadi is highly symbolic and of substantial strategic significance, despite the protestations to the contrary of Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey. In a joint press conference with Defense Secretary Ashton Carter on April 16, Dempsey stated: "The city itself is not symbolic is any way. It's not been declared part of the (Islamic State) caliphate or central to the future of Iraq, but we want to get it back. The issue here is not brick and mortar, it's about defeating ISIL." In fact, Ramadi is considered by ISIS to be part of its caliphate that now stretches from northern Syria to central Iraq. It is a key communications center along the Euphrates River corridor and the capital of al-Anbar province, a Sunni area in western Iraq that U.S. troops struggled to pacify for several years after the U.S. invasion in 2003. AQI back in 2005 and the days of Zarqawi considered Ramadi the capital of their Islami State of Iraq. In early 2005, this is where the heart of the Iraqi insurgency boiled. This Memorial Day, I am thinking of those soldiers who sacrificed their lives fighting in Ramadi. A revisit of Michael Totten's excellent blogposts: Anbar Awakens Part 1: The Battle of Ramadi Anbar Awakens Part II: Hell is Over In the Villages of Al Anbar I'm in the middle of Dick Couch's "The Sheriff of Ramadi" which follows the story of the Navy SEAL Task Unit who helped achieve victory in Ramadi through a successful implementation of counterinsurgency strategy. It's sat on my bookshelf for the last few years and I had hoped to finish it before today. Why does Ramadi matter? Why is its loss to ISIS so painful not only for Gold Star Moms like Debbie Lee? Why shouldn't their pain be our pain? Ramadi is where Marc Lee became the first Navy SEAL to be KIA in Iraq. Ramadi is where Michael Monsoor sacrificed his life. It's where Iraqis lost Sheik Sattar- an important figure in the Awakening; a leader who came to realize who the true foreign invaders were. During 2006, Ramadi and the Al-Anbar province accounted for half of the casualties endured by U.S. forces. By the end of 2006, there was a definite turnaround. And it was thanks in no small measure on account of the sacrifices made by those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. It is important for Americans to know and to remember: Any remembrance of war that doesn’t include the telling of individual stories lessens the purpose of the day–and why it is important that we remember. (Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...

To: longnshort who wrote (859880)	5/25/2015 4:18:37 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576159

Bush went to war for 400 old rusty Borak rockets?????? The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials. The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. nytimes.com

To: longnshort who wrote (859880)	5/25/2015 4:40:07 PM
From: Mongo2116	Respond to of 1576159

Male Texas lawmakers nearly fistfight on House floor after GOP women defect from anti-abortion bill DAVID EDWARDS 25 MAY 2015 AT 14:24 ET abortion battle in the Texas legislature nearly turned into a fistfight on Sunday night after several Republican women changed their mind about a bill that would ban health insurance from covering abortions. According to the Houston Chronicle, House sergeants had to stop Republican state Rep. Jonathan Stickland from attacking Rep. Byron Cook (R) after Senate Bill 575 did not make it to the House floor as he expected. Cook had reportedly promised to move SB 575 out of the State Affairs Committee to the CalendarS Committee if Stickland agreed to drop an amendment that would have banned abortions based on fetal abnormalities. Although Cook kept his word, three Republican women on the Calendars Committee — Reps. Sarah Davis, Debbie Riddle and Patricia Harless — backed out of supporting the bill at the last minute and sided with the Democrats, killing the measure with a 7-7 vote. At around 9:30 p.m., an enraged Stickland got in Cook’s face on the House floor. After a brief yelling match and nearly coming to blows, House sergeants got in between the two to prevent the scuffle from continuing, The Texas Tribune reported. Cook later told reporters that he never promised that the bill would pass the Calendars Committee. “My commitment was to get the bill out [of State Affairs], to get it to Calendars,” Cook said. “I did everything I could do. What I can’t do is interfere with other members’ free will to vote their conscience. Everybody should be able to do that. And women sent a clear message that they weren’t comfortable with this legislation, probably weren’t comfortable with us men telling them what to do. And I respect that.” But in the end, Stickland’s temper tantrum worked. The Calendars Committee reconvened after the House session and voted to move SB575 forward by a vote of 8-0. Two Republicans and all of the Democrats were marked as absent. Republican Rep. Debbie Riddle swung her vote in support of the bill, but it was not immediately clear why she had changed her mind.

To: longnshort who wrote (859880)	5/25/2015 4:42:32 PM
From: Mongo2116	Respond to of 1576159

Senate Panel Accuses Bush of Iraq Exaggerations TWITTERLINKEDINSIGN IN TO E-MAIL OR SAVE THIS PRINT REPRINTS SHARE By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE Published: June 5, 2008 WASHINGTON — A long-delayed Senate report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans has concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda. RelatedReports (pdf): Intelligence Activities \| Public Statements The report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it marks the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, is the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policymakers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by available intelligence. The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheneyand other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. In a statement accompanying the report, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said: “The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.” Dana Perino, the White House spokesman, on Thursday called the report a “selective view,” and said the Bush administration’s public statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress and endorsed by foreign intelligence services. Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the committee’s top Republican, called the report a “waste of committee time and resources.” The report on the prewar statements about Iraq found that on some key issues — most notably Iraq’s purported nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs — the public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other senior officials were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates at the time from American intelligence agencies. But the report found that the administration officials’ statements usually did not reflect the intelligences agencies’ uncertainties about the evidence or disputes among them. In a separate report, the Intelligence Committee provided new details about a series of clandestine meetings in Rome and Paris between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran, and they were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about internal rivalries inside of Iran and suspected Iranian “hit” team targeting American troops in Afghanistan. The report concludes that Stephen J. Hadley, now the national security adviser, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary, “acted within their authorities” to dispatch the Pentagon officials to Rome. At the same time, the report criticized the meetings as ill-advised and accused Mr. Hadley and Mr. Wolfowitz of keeping the State Department and intelligence agencies in the dark about the meetings, which it portrayed as part of a rogue intelligence operation. The two reports were the final parts of the committee’s so-called “phase two” investigation of prewar intelligence on Iraq and related issues. The first phase of the inquiry, begun in the summer of 2003 and completed in July 2004, identified grave faults in the Central Intelligence Agency’s analysis of the threat posed by Mr. Hussein. The report was especially critical of statements by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney that linked Iraq to Al Qaeda and raised the possibility that Mr. Hussein might supply the terrorist group with weapons of mass destruction. “Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote. Mr. Bond and four other Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from the report’s findings and suggested the investigation was a partisan smokescreen to obscure the real story: that Central Intelligence Agency failed the Bush administration by delivering intelligence assessments to policymakers that have since been discredited. In a detailed minority report, four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and their own campaign of cherry-picking — namely, refusing to include misleading public statements by such top Democrats as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Mr. Rockefeller. As an example, they pointed to an October 2002 speech by Mr. Rockefeller, who declared to his Senate colleagues that he had arrived at the “inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks, and we should not minimize the risks, we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with the threat.” The report about the Bush administration’s public statements does shed some new detail about the intelligence information available to policymakers as they built a case for war. In September 2002, for instance, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the Iraq problem cannot be solved by airstrikes alone” because Iraqi chemical and biological weapons were so deeply buried that they could not be penetrated by American bombs. Two months later, however, the National Intelligence Council wrote an assessment for Mr. Rumsfeld concluding that the Iraqi underground weapons facilities identified by the intelligence agencies “are vulnerable to conventional, precision-guided, penetrating munitions because they are not deeply buried.” On Thursday, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee, said Congress was never told about the National Intelligence Council assessment. SOB BUSH LIED....A MILLION DIED!!!