Ok.........here is my idea:
We (the US) are always telling other countries how to run their gig. Look what we did in Iraq. We told them to frame their government after ours.

That's ok with me if that's what they want to do.

Now here is what their justice system did.

Had a trial. A fair one at that. Heard all the evidence. Found ol Saddam Hussein guilty. Gave him one appeal. Appeal denied. Gave him the rope within one week!!!!!
The only state that comes close is Texas!!!!! They have an express line in Texas!!!! Good for you people!!!!

Do you think we should have the same deal here? (If there is NO doubt of guilt?)

 

While I hate the fact that most people on death row are just as likely to die from old age than at the hands of the state, Iraq carried out that sentence a bit quickly. Oh well, that is how they run thier country, but I don't think it would fly here. How would the protesters ever have enough time to organize a decent turnout?

 

As a christian, i object to any man or country killing another. And i dont celbrate anyone's death.

If you think we havent installed a puppet regiem, which does our bidding..youre mistaken.

That wasnt a fair trial, and not all the facts were heard. We had to silence him, to cover our own conplicity. We were the ones who sold him the nerve gas which he used on his own people. Why wasnt that brought out?

How come no one notices all the billions he stole, and now that he and his sons are dead....where did it go?

When ever a government acts quickly...like this, and our rush to war in Iraq...theres something very wrong. Its a coverup and not a very intelligent one at that. So far...the rest of the world still thinks we were wrong on both accounts.
This article was in the news today, and helps to explain the rush to kill.





Bush Silences a Dangerous Witness

By Robert Parry
December 30, 2006

Like a blue-blood version of a Mob family with global reach, the Bushes have eliminated one more key witness to the important historical events that led the U.S. military into a bloody stalemate in Iraq and pushed the Middle East to the brink of calamity.

The hanging of Saddam Hussein was supposed to be ? as the New York Times observed ? the ?triumphal bookend? to George W. Bush?s invasion of Iraq. If all had gone as planned, Bush might have staged another celebration as he did after the end of ?major combat,? posing under the ?Mission Accomplished? banner on May 1, 2003.

But now with nearly 3,000 American soldiers killed and the Iraqi death toll exceeding 600,000 by some estimates, Bush may be forced to savor the image of Hussein dangling at the end of a rope a little more privately.

Still, Bush has done his family?s legacy a great service while also protecting secrets that could have embarrassed other senior U.S. government officials.

He has silenced a unique witness to crucial chapters of the secret history that stretched from Iran?s Islamic revolution in 1979 to the alleged American-Saudi ?green light? for Hussein to attack Iran in 1980, through the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War during which high-ranking U.S. intermediaries, such as Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, allegedly helped broker supplies of war materiel for Hussein.

Hussein now won?t be around to give troublesome testimony about how he obtained the chemical and biological agents that his scientists used to produce the unconventional weapons that were deployed against Iranian forces and Iraqi civilians. He can?t give his perspective on who got the money and who facilitated the deals.

Nor will Hussein be available to give his account of the mixed messages delivered by George H.W. Bush?s ambassador April Glaspie before Hussein?s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Was there another American ?green light? or did Hussein just hear what he wanted to hear?

Like the climactic scene from the Mafia movie ?Casino? in which nervous Mob bosses eliminate everyone who knows too much, George W. Bush has now guaranteed that there will be no public tribunal where Hussein gives testimony on these potentially devastating historical scandals, which could threaten the Bush Family legacy.

That could have happened if Hussein had been turned over to an international tribunal at the Hague as was done with other tyrants, such as Yugoslavia?s late dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Instead Bush insisted that Hussein be tried in Iraq despite the obvious fact that the Iraqi dictator would receive nothing close to a fair trial before being put to death.

Hussein's hanging followed his trial for executing 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail in 1982 after a foiled assassination attempt on Hussein and his entourage. Hussein's death effectively moots other cases that were supposed to deal with his alleged use of chemical weapons to kill Iraqi civilians and other crimes that might have exposed the U.S. role.

[For details on what Hussein might have revealed, see Robert Parry?s Secrecy & Privilege or Consortiumnews.com?s ?Missing U.S.-Iraq History? or ?The Secret World of Robert Gates.?]

Thrill of the Kill

Some observers think that Bush simply wanted the personal satisfaction of seeing Hussein hanged, which would not have happened if he had been sent to the Hague. As Texas governor, Bush sometimes took what appeared to be perverse pleasure at his power to execute prisoners.

In a 1999 interview with conservative writer Tucker Carlson for Talk magazine, Bush ridiculed convicted murderer Karla Faye Tucker and her unsuccessful plea to Bush to spare her life.

Asked about Karla Faye Tucker?s clemency appeal, Bush mimicked what he claimed was the condemned woman?s message to him. ?With pursed lips in mock desperation, [Bush said]: ?Please don?t kill me.??

But a more powerful motive was always Hussein?s potential threat to the Bush Family legacy if he ever had a forum where he could offer detailed testimony about the historic events of the past several decades.

Since stepping into the White House on Jan. 20, 2001, George W. Bush has made it a top priority to conceal the history of his father?s 12 years as Vice President and President and to wrap his own presidency in a thick cloak of secrecy.

One of Bush?s first acts as President was to sign an executive order that blocked the scheduled release of historic records from his father?s years. After the 9/11 attacks, Bush expanded his secrecy mandate to grant his family the power to withhold those documents from the American public in perpetuity, passing down the authority to keep the secrets to future Bush generations.

So, even after George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush are dead, those noted historians Jenna and Barbara Bush will control key government documents covering a 20-year swath of U.S. history.

Already, every document at the George H.W. Bush presidential library must not only be cleared for release by specialists at the National Archives and ? if classified ? by the affected agencies, but also by the personal representatives of both the senior and junior George Bush.

With their backgrounds in secret societies like Skull and Bones ? and with George H.W. Bush?s work at the CIA ? the Bushes are keenly aware of the power that comes from controlling information. By keeping crucial facts from the American people, the Bushes feel they can turn the voters into easily manipulated children.

When there is a potential rupture of valuable information, the Bushes intervene, turning to influential friends to discredit some witness or relying on the U.S. military to make the threat go away. The Bushes have been helped immeasurably, too, by the credulity and cowardice of the modern U.S. news media and the Democratic Party.

What Can Be Done

Still, even with Hussein?s execution, there are actions that the American people can take to finally recover the lost history of the 1980s.

The U.S. military is now sitting on a treasure trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration exploited these documents to discredit the United Nations over the ?oil for food? scandal of the 1990s, ironically when Hussein wasn?t building weapons of mass destruction. But the Bush administration has withheld the records from the 1980s when Hussein was producing chemical and biological weapons.

In 2004, for instance the CIA released the so-called Duelfer report, which acknowledged that the administration?s pre-invasion assertions about Hussein hiding WMD stockpiles were ?almost all wrong.? But a curious feature of the report was that it included a long section about Hussein?s abuse of the U.N.?s ?oil for food? program, although the report acknowledged that the diverted funds had not gone to build illegal weapons.

Meanwhile, the report noted the existence of a robust WMD program in the 1980s but offered no documentary perspective on how that operation had occurred and who was responsible for the delivery of crucial equipment and precursor chemicals. In other words, the CIA?s WMD report didn?t identify the non-Iraqis who made Iraq?s WMD arsenal possible.

One source who has seen the evidence told me that it contains information about the role of Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen, who has been identified as a key link between the CIA and Iraq for the procurement of dangerous weapons in the 1980s. But that evidence has remained locked away.

With the Democrats taking control of Congress on Jan. 4, 2007, there could finally be an opportunity to force out more of the full story, assuming the Democrats don?t opt for their usual course of putting ?bipartisanship? ahead of oversight and truth.

The American people also could demand that the surviving members of Hussein?s regime be fully debriefed on their historical knowledge before their voices also fall silent either from natural causes or additional executions.

But the singular figure who could have put the era in its fullest perspective ? and provided the most damning evidence about the Bush Family?s role ? has been silenced for good, dropped through a trap door of a gallows and made to twitch at the end of a noose fashioned from hemp.

The White House announced that George W. Bush didn?t wait up for the happy news of Hussein?s hanging. After the U.S. military turned Hussein over to his Iraqi executioners, Bush went to bed at his Crawford, Texas, ranch and slept through the night.


My 2 cents

 

I dont thing we can just start hanging people off trees, but when you have killed as many people as saddam there is a special place in hell reserved for him. There are a few others that could have died a violent death with no mercy, such as Hitler, Musuliny, Jefry Dommer,Bin Ladin, the list could go on for a while. I figure an eye for an eye. why should some one show any mercy for some one who disreguards all life but there own. I think that the U.S. is trying to divert attention from the fact that bin laden killed thousands of americans on our own soil , not that saddam didnt deserve to die, but he never brought the war to our front door. I'm proud of our troops in Iraq, but dont think that they should be there. Its not fair to make them fight and die for the "oil war." just my opinion!

 

I can only extrapolate that you don't think Hussein killed anybody then? Or ordered his henchmen to kill anybody.......ever??? Because that is what the trial was all about.
If this is your stance; (I don't know if it is or not?) sorry, I dissagree. If it isn't, please explain?

One can debate the death sentence forever.

One can arrive at a correct deduction even without a trial. Hell, my mom did that all the time when I was a kid. Cookies were missing; and I had crumbs on my face. No trial, and I was busted. Any she was right.

IMHO, the guy killed thousands of people and got what was coming to him. I for one am glad he was tried in his own country and not here.

 

Its obvious that not all guilty parties will be brought to justice. No one says saddam was innocent...im saying others who are guilty are still in charge of this country.
Heres an op ed from todays paper


Robert Fisk: A dictator created then destroyed by America
Published: 30 December 2006
Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?

No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.

Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.

And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.

Hours before Saddam's death sentence, his family - his first wife, Sajida, and Saddam's daughter and their other relatives - had given up hope.

"Whatever could be done has been done - we can only wait for time to take its course," one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already announced his own "martyrdom": he was still the president of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last hours on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that spread over the mass-murderer's face - showed us which path Saddam intended to walk to the noose.

I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have talked to the Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against the dictator at our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us - and whose comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam's executioners.

I have walked round the execution chamber of Abu Ghraib - only months, it later transpired, after we had been using the same prison for a few tortures and killings of our own - and I have watched Iraqis pull thousands of their dead relatives from the mass graves of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted artificial hip and a medical identification number on his arm. He had been taken directly from hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have even shaken the dictator's soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal finished his days in power writing romantic novels.

It was my colleague, Tom Friedman - now a messianic columnist for The New York Times - who perfectly caught Saddam's character just before the 2003 invasion: Saddam was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone, part Donald Duck". And, in this unique definition, Friedman caught the horror of all dictators; their sadistic attraction and the grotesque, unbelievable nature of their barbarity.

But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first, those who suffered from Saddam's cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman's lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his end. But they - and millions of other Muslims - will remember how he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities," he may have been before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly - as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the new "Crusaders".

When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against American troops increased in ferocity. After his death, it will redouble in intensity again. Freed from the remotest possibility of Saddam's return by his execution, the West's enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there's a thought. So many crimes avenged.

But we will have got away with it.

 

It would indeed be a great thing if we had justice in America. We need to bring our own war criminals to justice...now that would really send a message to the rest of the world...that we can clean up our own messes.
This good article was in todays op eds.


Bringing the "Perps," Bush and Cheney, to Justice

Posted 3 January 2007
A Review of U.S. v. Bush
By Elizabeth de la Vega
Seven Stories Press, 2006,


According to President Bush, Saddam Hussein was brought to "justice," when, after being sentenced to die by a kangaroo court, he was taunted before his hanging by petulant Shiite's from Bush's puppet regime inside the Green Zone -- Baghdad's Alamo, where the quislings can cower and nominally rule on behalf of "democratic" Iraq.

Granted, Saddam was evil and his horrendous crimes demanded justice. After all, he gassed Kurds, executed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis and launched unprovoked invasions of Iran and Kuwait, in violation of international law. Yet, the indignities and blasphemies attending Saddam's hanging seem certain to inflame the civil war raging outside the Green Zone bubble.

Moreover, it's a shame that Iraqis couldn't overthrow their own tyrant and criminal, just as it's a shame that the puppet regime's "justice" required death - officially sanctioned murder at a time when sectarian murder has become a way of life. As I heard just the other day, an eye for an eye - taken to its logical conclusion - leaves everybody blind. Somebody must call a halt.

It's also a shame that Americans seem equally incapable of bringing their criminals in the Bush regime to justice. Criminals? Yes! As I've argued in an earlier article (http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/pelosi.html ), the Bush administration's decision to launch an unprovoked invasion of Iraq violated the United Nations Charter, which, as a treaty signed by the United States, is "the supreme Law of the Land." Unprovoked war is the highest of war crimes under international law.

But, as a former federal prosecutor, Elizabeth de la Vega, demonstrates in her recent book, U.S. v. Bush, prima facie evidence indicates that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, former National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, also broke the law by violating Title 18, United States Code, Section 371.

Title 18, United States Code, Section 371 "prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States." [p. 13] Or, as Ms. de la Vega puts it: "It is still the law of the United States that once politicians become Executive Branch officials, they are legally required to be honest and forthright about public matters." [p. 197]

A "conspiracy" is "an agreement between two or more persons to join together to accomplish some unlawful purpose." [p. 49] Moreover, "a standard jury instruction is that proof of a conspiracy does not require evidence that the defendants explicitly discussed details of the scheme or made some formal agreement." [p. 51]

"Fraud" includes lying, "but it's much more than lying." [p. 53] Under law, "a 'false' or 'fraudulent' representation is one that is: (a) made with knowledge that it is untrue; (b) a half-truth, (c) made without a reasonable basis or with reckless indifference to whether it is, in fact, true or false; or (d) literally true, but intentionally presented in a manner reasonably calculated to deceive a person of ordinary prudence or intelligence. The knowing concealment or omission of information that a reasonable person would consider important in deciding an issue also constitutes fraud." [p. 30]

Moreover, "continuing to assert something as true, even after receiving notice that would cause a reasonable person to inquire further about whether his statement is in fact true, is the same a knowingly and intentionally making a false statement." [p. 54]

Ms. de la Vega claims that Title 18, United States Code, Section 371 (conspiracy to defraud) is as applicable to the Bush administration as it was in securing the convictions of former Enron CEOs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. Which is to say: "As the [Enron] jury was instructed? anyone who makes representations intending that the public will rely on them, has an affirmative obligation to make sure that they are true and accurate. Representations made with reckless indifference to their truth are as false as outright lies." [p. 21]

For example, Mr. Lay "tired to convince his employees to buy stock by telling them that he had bought $4 million in stock that very month. What he didn't mention was that he had also sold $24 million." [p. 58]

Similarly, on August 26, 2002, Vice President Cheney asserted: "Simply stated there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," [p. 173] a claim subsequently proven to be false after the U.S. invaded Iraq and found no such weapons. In support of his claim, Cheney cited evidence provided by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, who had defected. Yet, in a blatant act of criminal fraud, Cheney failed to mention that the son-in-law also claimed that all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed.

Two examples - among hundreds -- of the Bush administration's criminal indifference to the truth occurred on October 2, 2002 and October 7, 2002, just days before Congress would approve a resolution authorizing him to use force against Iraq. On October 2nd President Bush asserted: "The Iraqi regime is a threat of unique urgency?it has developed weapons of mass destruction." [p. 192] And on October 7th President Bush gave a nationally televised speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, in which he claimed that Iraq "stands alone" as a unique threat.

Yet, just days before the October 7th speech, "a State Department representative was specifically informed by North Korean officials that North Korea already possessed nuclear weapons." [p. 225] Thus, the Bush administration fraudulently concealed information indicating that North Korea stood alone as the "unique" threat until after Congress approved its resolution concerning Iraq.

But, both speeches constituted attempts to defraud Congress and the American public. For, as we now know, the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, testified in February 2004 that "the intelligence community had never informed the President that Saddam Hussein presented an imminent or urgent threat,"[p. 192] let alone a threat that stands alone.

Thus, the October 2nd speech, the concealment of information about North Korea's nuclear weapons and the October 7th speech constitute prima facie evidence of a conspiracy to defraud Congress.

Want more evidence of Bush's criminal violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 371? Consider that, in his January 28, 2003, State of the Union address, Bush asserted that the "British have recently learned that Iraq was seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Although literally true, Bush's assertion was fraudulent because it was inserted as a way to weasel around the fact that "less than four months earlier, Tenet and the CIA had excised the sentence from the president's speech in Cincinnati because the assertion could not be confirmed and was thought to be shaky." [Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack pp. 294-95]

As Ms. de la Vega notes: "Much has been written regarding what the President knew when he made this statement, but the analysis of whether this statement is fraudulent in a criminal context is very simple." Consider the following: "this President is highly involved in the speech-writing process. At the time of the speech, the public's support for the war was waning and the President wanted specific proof. If he could have phrased this assertion more strongly, he would have. It may have been literally true - the British did acquire this information - but it already had been debunked. Bush's phrasing was an attempt to deceive the American public into believing that he was vouching for the British intelligence information when he knew he could not do so." [p. 231]

Ms de la Vega also makes an impressive prima facie case demonstrating that Condoleezza Rice criminally defrauded both the Congress and the American people on September 8, 2002, when she asserted that the aluminum tubes that Iraq had attempted to purchase were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." [p. 196] She's equally persuasive when indicting Vice President Cheney and President Bush for similarly fraudulent assertions about the tubes on September 8th and September 12th respectively.

Why so persuasive? Because fourteen U.S. intelligence assessments about the tubes had been produced by September 8th and twelve had "discussed problems with - or differences of opinion about - the CIA's contention that the Iraqis wanted the tubes for nuclear-centrifuge work." [p. 203] Thus, no government official possessing honesty and integrity could have made the reckless assertions that Rice, Cheney and Bush made about the aluminum tubes in September 2002.

Moreover, as Ms. de la Vega reminds us, the September 7, 2002 issue of the New York Times reported: "White House officials said today that the administration was following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein." [p. 184] Given the facts available to us today, it appears to have been a meticulously planned strategy to defraud.

Consider that the Times article also reported, "White House officials said they began planning more intensively for the Iraq rollout in July." Then consider that, during that same month, George Tenet apparently communicated elements of this "meticulous" plan to his British counterpart, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, Sir Richard Dearlove.

For, it was Dearlove - confidentially reporting to Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Cabinet about his recent talks in Washington (according to a "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL, - UK EYES ONLY" memo dated July 23, 2002) - who asserted: "There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable, Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy." [pp. 137-38]

This "fixing" of the intelligence explains Cheney's August fraud about Saddam's son-in-law, the frauds about the aluminum tubes perpetrated by Rice, Cheney and Bush in September, Bush's attempt to defraud Congress in early October, as well as his "uranium" fraud in January 2003 State of the Union speech.

Yet, Colin Powell's efforts to defraud America and the world about the tubes were among the most egregious. For, when he made his false assertions about Iraq's aluminum tubes to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, Powell already knew that his own State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research "was not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use in centrifuge rotors." [p. 212] And he already knew that the International Atomic Energy Agency had already denounced 'the possibility that the tubes had a nuclear application."[p. 213]

Ms. de la Vega also presents persuasive evidence indicating that Bush also defrauded Congress and the American public when he claimed to have no war plan on his desk and when he diverted funds ($700 million) and resources (some "1,800 U.S. troops, including the elite Fifth Group Special Forces who had tracking Osama bin Laden") from Afghanistan to Iraq. [pp. 107-112]

Nevertheless, Ms. de la Vega could have strengthened her legal case against the Bush administration's fraud, had she included the following information:

(1) Beginning in October 2001, a rogue intelligence office headed by Douglas Feith (and subsequently called Feith's "Gestapo office" by Colin Powell, see http://www.walter-c-uhler.com/Reviews/Gestapo.html ) funneled bogus intelligence about Saddam's ties to al Qaeda up the DOD chain of command, through Paul Wolfowitz to Rumsfeld and Cheney. Throughout 2002, this bogus intelligence was given preference over the legitimate intelligence reports, which correctly found no such ties.

(2) On August 29, 2002 Bush signed a TOP SECRET National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD), titled: "Iraq: Goals, Objectives and Strategies." The product of weeks, if not months of work, the directive "was a good way to make sure everyone was operating with the same instruction." [Woodward, p. 154] One of the goals was to "free Iraq in order to eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction." One of the objectives was to "minimize disruption in international oil markets." One of the strategies was "to work with the Iraqi opposition to demonstrate that we are liberating, not invading Iraq." [Woodward, pp. 154-55] Although not the "Ten Commandments," [Woodward, p. 154] this NSPD locked in the Bush drive for an invasion before he opened his so-called dialogue with the Congress and the American public, and before he took his case to the United Nations.

(3) On September 6, 2002, General Tommy Franks informed Bush: "Mr. President, we've been looking for scud missiles and other weapons of mass destruction for ten years and haven't found any yet, so I can't tell you that I know that there are any specific weapons anywhere." {Woodward, p. 173]

Unfortunately, the conspiracy to defraud continued after Bush illegal, immoral invasion. On March 30, 2003, Rumsfeld lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." Yet, not only was Rumsfeld present when General Franks expressed his doubts about WMD to President Bush the previous September, on October 12, 2002, he also made his own list of what could go wrong in Iraq. Item 13 was: "U.S. could fail to find WMD on the ground." [Woodward, State of Denial, p. 99]

And, in December 2003, some nine months after the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq proved his reckless assertions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to be false, ABC's Diane Sawyer pressed Bush about justifying a war to the American public by stating "as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he [Saddam] could move to acquire those weapons." Put on the spot, Bush defrauded Ms. Sawyer and all Americans when he responded: "So what's the difference?"

The difference is precisely this: You, President Bush, commit fraud when you deceive the Congress and the public by making the case stronger than it actually is! You punk!

Equally unfortunate, the Bush administration conspires to defraud Americans to this very day. Thus, notwithstanding the unabated and uncritical news coverage of the "perps," you should approach all of their pronouncements with extreme skepticism.

Why? Because, by presenting evidence gained from "speeches, public remarks, White House press briefings, interviews, congressional testimony, official documents, all public intelligence reports and various summaries of intelligence, such as the reports of the Senate Select committee on Intelligence and the 9/11 commission," [p. 12] in a hypothetical grand jury setting, Elizabeth de la Vega persuasively has demonstrated that "our highest government officials employ[ed] the universal techniques of fraudsters - deliberate concealment, misrepresentations, false pretenses [and] half-truths - to deceive Congress and the American people." [p. 14]

Which prompts one final question: "When will 'our highest government officials' ACTUALLY be brought to justice?"

 

Honda buster ,don't know where your getting all your liberal talking points ,why don't you go and spend a year over talking to the Iraqi people ,I DID ,and see what kind of life they were living under Saddams rein .

Not a life I would like to live ,you should bend down and kiss the soil under your feet ,that so many soilders have giving there life to protect your rights .

easy to find blame when your not putting up any thing you cherish .

 

What are we fighting for again? Oil? Money?

Maybe we need another "Color code alert" or somthing cause I need to be scared into thinking we are doing the right thing again....

 

Quote
"Beware the leader who beats the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into patriotic fervor, for patriotism is a double-edged sword. It emboldens the blood and narrows the mind.

And when the drums of war have reached fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need to seize the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." end


Sounds like a circular argument - no solution. Determine who the real enemy is. He is in our own country and we strengthen him by keeping ourselves divided (political,religion,group affiliations,etc)