Fire!

wrote in message
ps.com...
On Nov 1, 1:59 am, "John Wheaton" wrote:

Ah but they do. Saddam refused to allow inspectors unfettered access, or
settle the where abouts of "thousands of tonnes" of chemical weapons whne
it
was made quite clear that he would be deposed.

Don't people understand bluffing and grand-standing?
It was pretty obvious to me that in the weeks before
the "war" Saddam had been pushed to the wall and
had no more cards to play. He _had_ given in.

"When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and
chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf
War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection
processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four
days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it;
we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know. So I thought it was
prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N. to say you got
to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don't cooperate the penalty
could be regime change, not just continued sanctions."
--Bill Clinton, July 22, 2003


FORMER PRESIDENT CLINTON is right about what he and the whole world knew
about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs. And most of
what everyone knew about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction had nothing to
do with this or any other government's intelligence collection and analysis.
Had there never been a Central Intelligence Agency--an idea we admit sounds
more attractive all the time--the case for war against Iraq would have been
rock solid. Almost everything we knew about Saddam's weapons programs and
stockpiles, we knew because the Iraqis themselves admitted it.

Here's a little history that seems to have been completely forgotten in the
frenzy of the past few months. Shortly after the first Gulf War in 1991,
U.N. inspectors discovered the existence of a surprisingly advanced Iraqi
nuclear weapons program. In addition, by Iraq's own admission and U.N.
inspection efforts, Saddam's regime possessed thousands of chemical weapons
and tons of chemical weapon agents. Were it not for the 1995 defection of
senior Iraqi officials, the U.N. would never have made the further discovery
that Iraq had manufactured and equipped weapons with the deadly chemical
nerve agent VX and had an extensive biological warfare program.

Here is what was known by 1998 based on Iraq's own admissions:

* That in the years immediately prior to the first Gulf War, Iraq produced
at least 3.9 tons of VX, a deadly nerve gas, and acquired 805 tons of
precursor ingredients for the production of more VX.

* That Iraq had produced or imported some 4,000 tons of ingredients to
produce other types of poison gas.

* That Iraq had produced 8,500 liters of anthrax.

* That Iraq had produced 500 bombs fitted with parachutes for the purpose of
delivering poison gas or germ payloads.

* That Iraq had produced 550 artillery shells filled with mustard gas.

* That Iraq had produced or imported 107,500 casings for chemical weapons.

* That Iraq had produced at least 157 aerial bombs filled with germ agents.

* That Iraq had produced 25 missile warheads containing germ agents
(anthrax, aflatoxin, and botulinum).

Again, this list of weapons of mass destruction is not what the Iraqi
government was suspected of producing. (That would be a longer list,
including an Iraqi nuclear program that the German intelligence service had
concluded in 2001 might produce a bomb within three years.) It was what the
Iraqis admitted producing. And it is this list of weapons--not any CIA
analysis under either the Clinton or Bush administrations--that has been at
the heart of the Iraq crisis.

For in all the years after those admissions, the Iraqi government never
explained, or even tried to explain, to anyone's satisfaction, including
most recently, that of Hans Blix, what had become of the huge quantities of
deadly weapons it had produced. The Iraqi government repeatedly insisted
that most of the weapons had been "secretly" destroyed. When asked to
produce credible evidence of the destruction--the location of destruction
sites, fragments of destroyed weapons, some documentation of the
destruction, anything at all--the Iraqis refused. After 1995, the U.N.
weapons inspection process became a lengthy cat-and-mouse game, as
inspectors tried to cajole Iraqis to divulge information about the fate of
these admitted stockpiles of weapons. The inspectors fanned out across the
country looking for weapons caches, stashes of documents, and people willing
to talk. And sometimes, the inspectors uncovered evidence. Both American and
French testers found traces of nerve gas on remnants of warheads, for
instance. The Iraqis claimed the evidence had been planted.

After 1996, and partly as a consequence of the documents they had discovered
and of Iraqi admissions, weapons inspectors must have started getting closer
to uncovering what the Iraqis were hiding. For at about that time,
inspectors' demands to visit certain facilities began to be systematically
blocked by Saddam. There was the famous confrontation over the so-called
"presidential palaces," actually vast complexes of buildings and warehouses,
that Saddam simply declared off-limits to inspectors.

At the end of 1997, this limitation on the inspectors' freedom of movement
precipitated an international crisis. The Clinton administration demanded
that the inspectors be given full access to the "palaces." The Iraqis
refused. Instead, Saddam demanded the removal of all Americans from the U.N.
inspection team and an end to all U-2 flights over Iraq, and even threatened
to shoot the planes down. In case there was any doubt that his aim was to
conceal weapons programs that the inspectors were getting close to
discovering, Iraq at this time also began moving equipment that could be
used to manufacture weapons out of the range of video cameras that had been
installed by the U.N. inspection team.

The New York Times reported at the time that the U.N. weapons inspectors
(not American intelligence) believed that Iraq possessed "the elements of a
deadly germ warfare arsenal and perhaps poison gases, as well as the
rudiments of a missile system" that could launch the warheads. But because
of Saddam's action at the end of 1997, the Times reported, the U.N.
inspection team could "no longer verify that Iraq is not making weapons of
mass destruction" and specifically could not monitor "equipment that could
grow seed stocks of biological agents in a matter of hours." Saddam's
precipitating of this crisis was a bold move, aimed at splitting the U.N.
Security Council and isolating the Clinton administration. And it worked.
The Clinton administration tried but failed to get French and Russian
support at the Security Council either for military action or for a
tightening of sanctions to force Saddam to cease these activities and comply
with his commitment to disarm. The French and Russian position by 1997 was
that the "books" should be closed on Iraq's WMD programs, sanctions should
be lifted, and relations with Saddam should be normalized. That remained the
French position for the next five years.

It was in response to this crisis that we at this magazine began calling for
Saddam Hussein's ouster by means of a ground invasion. And in a letter sent
to President Clinton on January 26, 1998, we and a number of other former
government officials urged military action against Saddam on the grounds
that the situation had become untenable and perilous. As a result of recent
events, we wrote, the United States could


no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to
uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades U.N.
inspections. Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing
weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even
if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly
unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to
monitor Iraq's chemical and biological weapons production. The lengthy
period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi
facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover
all of Saddam's secrets. As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will
be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq
does or does not possess such weapons. Such uncertainty will, by itself,
have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East.

IN EARLY 1998, the Clinton administration, following this same logic,
prepared for war against Iraq. On February 17, President Clinton spoke on
the steps of the Pentagon to explain to the American people why war was
necessary. The speech is worth excerpting at length, because it was then and
remains today the fundamental case for the invasion of Iraq and the removal
of Saddam Hussein from power.

President Clinton declared that the great threat confronting the United
States and its allies was a lethal and "unholy axis" of international
terrorists and outlaw states. "They will be all the more lethal if we allow
them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the
missiles to deliver them." There was, Clinton declared, "no more clear
example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq. His regime threatens the
safety of his people, the stability of his region and the security of all
the rest of us." Before the Gulf War of 1991, Clinton noted, "Saddam had
built up a terrible arsenal, and he had used it. Not once, but many times in
a decade-long war with Iran, he used chemical weapons against combatants,
against civilians, against a foreign adversary and even against his own
people." At the end of the Gulf War, Saddam had promised to reveal all his
programs and disarm within 15 days. But instead, he had spent "the better
part of the past decade trying to cheat on this solemn commitment." As
Clinton explained:


Iraq repeatedly made false declarations about the weapons that it had left
in its possession after the Gulf War. When UNSCOM would then uncover
evidence that gave the lie to those declarations, Iraq would simply amend
the reports. For example, Iraq revised its nuclear declarations four times
within just 14 months, and it has submitted six different biological warfare
declarations, each of which has been rejected by UNSCOM.
In 1995 Hussein Kamal, Saddam's son-in-law and the chief organizer of
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, defected to Jordan. He revealed
that Iraq was continuing to conceal weapons and missiles and the capacity to
build many more. Then and only then did Iraq admit to developing numbers of
weapons in significant quantities--and weapons stocks. Previously it had
vehemently denied the very thing it just simply admitted once Saddam's
son-in-law defected to Jordan and told the truth.

Now listen to this: What did it admit? It admitted, among other things, an
offensive biological warfare capability, notably, 5,000 gallons of
botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25
biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And I might say
UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its
production. . . .

Next, throughout this entire process, Iraqi agents have undermined and
undercut UNSCOM. They've harassed the inspectors, lied to them, disabled
monitoring cameras, literally spirited evidence out of the back doors of
suspect facilities as inspectors walked through the front door, and our
people were there observing it and had the pictures to prove it. . . .

Over the past few months, as [the weapons inspectors] have come closer and
closer to rooting out Iraq's remaining nuclear capacity, Saddam has
undertaken yet another gambit to thwart their ambitions by imposing
debilitating conditions on the inspectors and declaring key sites which have
still not been inspected off limits, including, I might add, one palace in
Baghdad more than 2,600 acres large. . . .

One of these presidential sites is about the size of Washington, D.C. . .
..

It is obvious that there is an attempt here, based on the whole history of
this operation since 1991, to protect whatever remains of his capacity to
produce weapons of mass destruction, the missiles to deliver them, and the
feed stocks necessary to produce them. The UNSCOM inspectors believe that
Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small
force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its
production program and build many, many more weapons. . . .

Now, let's imagine the future. What if he fails to comply and we fail to
act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more
opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction and
continue to press for the release of the sanctions and continue to ignore
the solemn commitments that he made? Well, he will conclude that the
international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can
go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction.

And some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal. . . . In
the next century, the community of nations may see more and more of the very
kind of threat Iraq poses now--a rogue state with weapons of mass
destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug
traffickers, or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed.

If we fail to respond today, Saddam, and all those who would follow in his
footsteps, will be emboldened tomorrow by the knowledge that they can act
with impunity, even in the face of a clear message from the United Nations
Security Council, and clear evidence of a weapons of mass destruction
program.

The Clinton administration did not in fact respond. War was averted by a
lame compromise worked out by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. But within
a few months, Saddam was again obstructing U.N. inspectors, driving a deeper
wedge into the U.N. Security Council and attempting to put a final end to
the inspections process. He succeeded. At the end of 1998, the Clinton
administration launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day missile and bombing
attack on Iraq that was aimed principally at known and suspected facilities
for producing weapons of mass destruction and missiles. The effect of the
bombings on Iraq's programs and stockpiles, however, was unknown, as Clinton
acknowledges. But one effect of Operation Desert Fox was that Saddam
expelled the U.N. inspectors altogether. Beginning in December 1998 and for
the next four years, there were no U.N. inspectors in Iraq.

What did Saddam Hussein do during those four years of relative freedom? To
this day, no one knows for sure. The only means of learning Iraqi activities
during those years were intelligence, satellite photography, electronic
eavesdropping, and human sources. The last of these was in short supply.
And, as we now know, the ability to determine the extent of Saddam's
programs only by so-called technical means was severely limited. American
and foreign intelligence services pieced together what little information
they could, but they were trying to illuminate a dark cave with a Bic
lighter. Without a vast inspection team on the ground, operating unfettered
and over a long period of time, it was clear that the great unanswered
questions regarding Iraq--what happened to the old stockpiles of weapons and
what new programs Saddam was working on--could never be answered.

The rest of the story, we assume, most people remember. The Bush
administration's threat of war beginning last summer led France and Russia
to reverse themselves and to start taking the Iraq weapons issue seriously
again. In U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, the Security Council agreed
on a new round of inspections, during which Saddam was to do finally what he
had promised to do back in 1991 and ever since: make a clean breast of all
his programs, answer all the unanswered questions about his admitted
stockpiles of weapons, and fully disarm. Resolution 1441 demanded that,
within 30 days, Iraq provide "a currently accurate, full, and complete
declaration of all aspects of its programmes to develop chemical,
biological, and nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and other delivery
systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and dispersal systems designed for
use on aircraft, including any holdings and precise locations of such
weapons, components, sub-components, stocks of agents, and related material
and equipment, the locations and work of its research, development and
production facilities, as well as all other chemical, biological, and
nuclear programmes, including any which it claims are for purposes not
related to weapon production or material."

Iraq did not comply with this demand within 30 days--or, for that matter,
within 90. In his March 6, 2003, report to the U.N. Security Council, Hans
Blix reported that the declared stocks of anthrax and VX remained
unaccounted for. In the last chance given to Iraq by Resolution 1441, Iraq
had failed to provide answers. As Blix reported again in May 2003, "little
progress was made in the solution of outstanding issues....the long list of
proscribed items unaccounted for and as such resulting in unresolved
disarmament issues was not shortened either by the inspections or by Iraqi
declarations and documentation."

We have retold this long story for one simple reason: This is why George W.
Bush and Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar led their governments and a host of
others to war to remove the Saddam Hussein regime in March 2003. It was not,
in the first instance, to democratize the Middle East, although we have
always believed and still believe that the building of a democratic Iraq, if
the United States succeeds in doing so, will have a positive impact on the
Arab world. It was not to increase the chances of an Arab-Israeli peace,
although we still believe that the removal of a dangerous radical tyrant
like Saddam Hussein may make that difficult task somewhat easier. It was not
because we believed Saddam Hussein had ordered the September 11 attack,
although we believe the links between Saddam and al Qaeda are becoming
clearer every day (see Stephen F. Hayes's article on page 33 of this issue).
Nor did the United States and its allies go to war because we believed that
some quantity of "yellowcake" was making its way from Niger to Iraq, or that
Saddam was minutes away from launching a nuclear weapon against Chicago. We
never believed the threat from Saddam was "imminent" in that sense.

The reason for war, in the first instance, was always the strategic threat
posed by Saddam because of his proven record of aggression and barbarity,
his admitted possession of weapons of mass destruction, and the certain
knowledge of his programs to build more. It was the threat he posed to his
region, to our allies, and to core U.S. interests that justified going to
war this past spring, just as it also would have justified a Clinton
administration decision to go to war in 1998. It was why Bill Clinton,
Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, and many other top officials had
concluded in the late 1990s that Saddam Hussein was an intolerable menace to
his neighbors, to American allies, and ultimately to the United States
itself, and therefore had eventually to be removed. It was also why a large
number of Democrats, including John Kerry and General Wesley Clark,
expressed support for the war last year, before Howard Dean and his roaring
left wing of the Democratic party made support for "Bush's war" untenable
for Democratic candidates.


NOTHING THAT HAS or has not been discovered in Iraq since the end of the war
changes this fundamental judgment. Those who always objected to the
rationale for the war want to use the failure so far to discover large
caches of weapons to re-litigate the question. Democrats fearful of their
party's left wing are using it to jump off the positions they held last
year. That's politics. But back in the real world, the fact that David Kay's
inspections teams have not yet found out what happened to Saddam's admitted
stockpiles is not surprising. U.N. weapons inspectors did not find those
caches of weapons in 12 years; Kay and his team have had about four months.
Yes, we wish Saddam had left his chemical munitions and biological weapons
neatly stacked up in a warehouse somewhere marked on the outside with a big,
yellow skull and crossbones. We wish he had published his scientists'
nuclear designs in the daily paper. Or we wish we could find the "Dear
Diary" entry where he explains exactly what happened to all the weapons he
built. But he did not leave these helpful hints behind.

After Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. military was led by an Iraqi to a
part of the desert where, lo and behold, a number of MiG fighter jets had
been buried under the sand. Note that the Americans did not discover the
jets themselves. Discovering chemical and biological munitions will be
somewhat harder. Kay recently reported to Congress that there are
approximately 130 Ammunition Storage Points scattered across Iraq, a country
the size of France. Many of the ammunition depots take up more than 50
square miles. Together they hold 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets,
aviation bombs, and other ordinance. Under Saddam, U.N. inspectors learned,
the Iraqi military stored chemical ordnance at the same ammunition depots
where the conventional rounds were stored. Do you know how many of the 130
Iraqi ammunition depots have been searched since the end of the war? Ten.
Only 120 to go.

Saddam Hussein had four years of unfettered activity in which to hide and
reconfigure his weapons programs. Our intelligence on this, as we noted
earlier, may have been lousy. David Kay's task has essentially been to
reconstruct a story we don't know. In fact, he's learned quite a bit in a
very short time. For instance, as Kay reported to Congress, his team has
uncovered "dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts
of equipment that Iraq concealed from the U.N. during the inspections that
began in late 2002" (emphasis added). In addition, based on admissions by
Iraqi scientists and government officials, Kay and his team have discovered:

* A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi
Intelligence Service that contained equipment suitable for research in the
production of chemical and biological weapons. This kind of equipment was
explicitly mentioned in Hans Blix's requests for information, but was
instead concealed from Blix throughout his investigations.

* A prison laboratory complex, which may have been used in human testing of
biological weapons agents. Iraqi officials working to prepare for U.N.
inspections in 2002 and 2003 were explicitly ordered not to acknowledge the
existence of the prison complex.

* So-called "reference strains" of biological organisms, which can be used
to produce biological weapons. The strains were found in a scientist's home.

* New research on agents applicable to biological weapons, including Congo
Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever, and continuing research on ricin and
aflatoxin--all of which was, again, concealed from Hans Blix despite his
specific request for any such information.

* Plans and advanced design work on new long-range missiles with ranges up
to at least 1,000 kilometers--well beyond the 150-kilometer limit imposed on
Iraq by the U.N. Security Council. These missiles would have allowed Saddam
to threaten targets from Ankara to Cairo.

In addition to these banned activities, which were occurring right under the
noses of the U.N. inspectors this past year, Kay and his team also
discovered a massive effort to destroy evidence of weapons programs, an
effort that began before the war and continued during it and even after the
war. In the "looting" that followed the fall of Baghdad, computer hard
drives were destroyed in government buildings--thus making the computers of
no monetary value to actual looters. Kay also found documents burned or
shredded. And people whom the Kay team tried to interview were in some cases
threatened with retaliation by Saddam loyalists. Indeed, two of the
scientists were subsequently shot. Others involved in the weapons programs
have refused to talk for fear of eventual prosecution for war crimes.

Nevertheless, Kay has begun piecing together the story of what happened to
Saddam's weapons and how he may have shifted direction in the years after
1998. It is possible that instead of building up large stockpiles of
weapons, Saddam decided the safer thing would be to advance his covert
programs for producing weapons but wait until the pressure was off to
produce the weapons themselves. By the time inspectors returned to Iraq in
2002, Saddam was ready to be a little more forthcoming, because he had
rejiggered his program to withstand somewhat greater scrutiny. Nevertheless,
even then he could not let the inspectors see everything. Undoubtedly he
hoped that if he could get through that last round, he would be home free,
eventually without sanctions or further inspections.

There are no doubt some Americans who believe that this would have been an
acceptable outcome. Or who believe that another six months of inspections
would have uncovered all that Saddam was hiding. Or that a policy of
"containment"--which included 200,000 troops on Iraq's borders as an
inducement to permit inspections--could have been sustained indefinitely
both at the U.N. Security Council and in Washington. We believe the
overwhelming lesson of our history with Saddam is that none of these options
would have succeeded. Had Saddam Hussein not been removed this year, it
would have been only a matter of time before this president or some future
president was compelled to take action against him, and in more dangerous
circumstances.

There are people who will never accept this logic, who prefer to believe, or
claim to believe, that the whole Iraq affair was, in the words of Ted
Kennedy, a "fraud" "made up in Texas" for political gain, or who believe
that it was the product of a vast conspiracy orchestrated by a tiny little
band of "neoconservatives." Some of the people propagating this
conspiratorial view of the Iraq war are now running for the Democratic
nomination for president; one of them is even a former general who led the
war against Slobodan Milosevic in 1999. We wish them the best of luck
selling their conspiracy theories to the American people. But we trust Bill
Clinton won't be stumping for them on this particular issue.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/conten...3/236jmcbd.asp

On Oct 31, 11:58 pm, "Jochen Kriegerowski" jochen-kriegerow...@t-
online.de wrote:
"memiki" schrieb

You cannot separate the President from the Office of the President.
If you insult the President, you insult the Office of the
Presidency

Every 4 years you have a job vacancy: The "Office of the President"
needs a new employee. Then you hire someone.

Never forget: *You* are the boss, not the guy you hired!

If your employees don't do their job well you are free to criticize
or sack them. Without damaging your "company", aka nation, or
their job as such. On the contrary: If you don't, you might do more
harm.

Jochen

Jochen -- I appreciate your analogy, but this is no ordinary
"employee" -- he has more power than his "boss"........and the
company for whom he works is no ordinary company

"The President is the head of the executive branch and plays a large
role in making America's laws. His job is to approve the laws that
Congress creates. When the Senate and the House approve a bill, they
send it to the President. If he agrees with the law, he signs it and
the law goes into effect.

If the President does not like a bill, he can refuse to sign it. When
he does this, it is called a veto. If the President vetoes a bill, it
will most likely never become a law. Congress can override a veto, but
to do so two-thirds of the Members of Congress must vote against the
President.

Despite all of his power, the President cannot write bills. He can
propose a bill, but a member of Congress must submit it for him.

In addition to playing a key role in the lawmaking process, the
President has several duties. He serves as the American Head of State,
meaning that he meets with the leaders of other countries and can make
treaties with them. However, the Senate must approve any treaty before
it becomes official.

The President is also the Chief of the Government. That means that he
is technically the boss of every government worker.

Also, the President is the official head of the U.S. military. He can
authorize the use of troops overseas without declaring war. To
officially declare war, though, he must get the approval of the
Congress."

Miki

"memiki" schrieb

Jochen -- I appreciate your analogy, but this is no ordinary
"employee"

Right. Anyway, I hope you don't mind if I stick to my analogy
for a moment.

You quote the constitutional position of your president, and I am
well aware that he has far more power than our chancellor, for
example.

Your list (Head of the executive branch, head of state, head
of the military...) can be compared to a "job description" in an
ordinary company. That, in my view, is the "office of the presi-
dent", and you can argue that it is not apropriate to criticise this
"job description", because it would mean criticising the constitu-
tion. But criticising the person who holds the job is something
else.

Jochen

On Nov 1, 12:20 am, "Peter D" [email protected] wrote:
"memiki" wrote





On Oct 31, 9:08 am, "Peter D" [email protected] wrote:
"memiki" wrote
It is my feeling that when an American publicly insults the Office of
the Presidency outside the country, whether it be the Dixie Chicks on
a stage in England or Ike or you on a public forum, harm is done to
the country. There is enough garbage being thrown by other countries
without having sine if our own add to the heap.

While I see your point re showing respect to the office and what the
office
represents, I can assure you that lieing to the American public and the
world at large about the rationale for starting a war, presiding over the
invasion of a sovereign nation, and assorted grand scale evils and malice
doe sfar, far more damage. On a perosnal note, his Adminsitration's
treatment of Canadian citizens deemed "enemey combatants" and
"terrorists"
including being held without consular access, bail, access to counsel,
being
shipped off to Syria to be tortured for a year, and assorted routine
dismissals of the rule of International Law, the Geneva Convention, the
US
Constitution and Bill of Rights, etc, etc. etc. does far more damage than
being called an "Idiot".

Peter -- I am not asking anyone to lie!.... nor am I "silencing"
anyone.......just asking for people in a public forum to state their
dissenting opinions in a civil manner and as a mature adult.

Miki, I didn't say your were. I simply related a view that I saw a parallel.
Dont' take it so personally. :-)- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thank you, Peter.........I'll work on your suggestion to not take
things so personally........Miki

On Nov 1, 1:15 am, "Jochen Kriegerowski" jochen-kriegerow...@t-
online.de wrote:
"memiki" schrieb

Jochen -- I appreciate your analogy, but this is no ordinary
"employee"

Right. Anyway, I hope you don't mind if I stick to my analogy
for a moment.

You quote the constitutional position of your president, and I am
well aware that he has far more power than our chancellor, for
example.

Your list (Head of the executive branch, head of state, head
of the military...) can be compared to a "job description" in an
ordinary company. That, in my view, is the "office of the presi-
dent", and you can argue that it is not apropriate to criticise this
"job description", because it would mean criticising the constitu-
tion. But criticising the person who holds the job is something
else.

Jochen
"
I see your point and it has me thinking....I grew up in Boston. Every
morning the teacher read a psalm from the Bible......we said the
"Pledge to the Flag and sang "The Star-Spangled Banner", our national
anthem.. Whenever the President's motorcade came through our city, my
mother took me to see the motorcade and we brought flowers to give to
the President.......I once did a tap dance for him. In our house, the
President was revered. As a mature adult, I am unable to separate the
Flag, the Presidency and the Country from each other......instead they
are bundled up in one package.

That said, I definitely have anger towards celebrities publicly
insulting the President with a word such as "idiot" while performing
in another country and posters doing the same. It feels wrong and I am
not able to come to terms with that.

Miki

memiki wrote:
Ike -- Have you posted anything from the "Fire" thread to your other
newsgroups?

You could look at the message header.

I don't recall seeing the names of five posters here
before, so they could be either first-time posters or don't post
often. They are from out of the country, and it appears they belong to
some of the same usenet groups as you do.

Yes, it's cross-posted to rec.travel.usa-canada as I thought my
original statement relevant. Here, because so many participants in
this forum live in Southern California and there because I thought it
relevant.

I'm familiar with most of the posters with whom you're not; have even
been to the home of one of 'em.

Another, with whom I've dined in Manhattan, has yet to comment.

--
__________________________________________________ _________________
A San Franciscan in 47.452 mile² San Francisco.
http://geocities.com/dancefest/ --- http://geocities.com/iconoc/
TouringSFO: http://geocities.com/touringsfo/ - IClast @ Gmail.com


--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

On Nov 1, 2:20 am, memiki wrote:
On Oct 31, 9:38 pm, "sharx35" wrote:

Hatunen wrote:
On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 04:50:46 -0800, Icono Clast
wrote:

But neither I nor the Dixie Chicks insulted the Office of the
Presidency. I have the greatest of respect for it, as I'm sure most
people on the planet do, even if held by the likes of the incumbent.

The greatest insult to the office of the President is the
incumbent.

The terrorists just love it when assholes like you make posts like that.

Forgive me, Ike, for saying.......but you are being
hypocritical.........the President IS the Office of the Presidency;
otherwise, it is just a room with a desk

No, he is not, and he needs to remember that once and a bit.
The office is not a room, it is not a desk, and it is not a person.
It is an institution with powers and a history. That history, those
powers travel with the office, not the person, and not the desk.
And because of that, the respect we show the office is to
try to control and stop the man holding the office using
the laws of the land, for which he himself shows so little
respect. It is because of the respect for the office that we
don't just push the man aside and ignore him.

Peter D wrote:
"Icono Clast" wrote:
Read The Constitution! It's all protected speech. In fact, the
more offensive it is, the more bigoted it is, the more hateful
it is, the stronger the protection provided by the First
Amendment!

Not so. Speech is protected equally without regard to it's level
of offensiveness. Maybe you meant to say the more offensive it is,
the greater the need to protect it -- because it is only when
dealing with that and those we dislike the most that we discover
just how committed we the rights of all.

Wish I'd said that. Thank you, Peter.

--
__________________________________________________ _________________
George Bush is the best argument in favor of the Second Amendment
http://geocities.com/dancefest/ --- http://geocities.com/iconoc/
TouringSFO: http://geocities.com/touringsfo/ - IClast @ Gmail.com

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

Dave Smith wrote:
No. Not every major intelligence agency thought that. Those that
did were swayed by "intelligence" provided by the US, and the
administration has admitted that they acted on the basis of faulty
intelligence.

There's a Bill Moyers program about just that. Well worth the time to
view.

memiki said:
I am unable to separate the Flag, the Presidency and the Country
from each other......instead they are bundled up in one package.

That position might not be unique to you but I've never heard of such
a thing. I regard each of them as distinct and separate. I think it
resembles the Catholics' trinity and the separateness thereof by
other Christians.

insulting the President . . . feels wrong
come to terms with that.

I am not the only one to disagree.

and I am not able to

Most of us don't have to.

--
__________________________________________________ _________________
Jail to The Chief
http://geocities.com/dancefest/ --- http://geocities.com/iconoc/
TouringSFO: http://geocities.com/touringsfo/ - IClast @ Gmail.com

--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

John Wheaton wrote:


Ah but they do. Saddam refused to allow inspectors unfettered access, or
settle the where abouts of "thousands of tonnes" of chemical weapons whne it
was made quite clear that he would be deposed.

The same argument applies to North Korea, etc..
Too many war-mongers.


Ah you mention war-mongers so you do remember Saddam invading Iran and
Kuwait.

I am sure we all know about Saddam invading Kuwait. That was what led to
the first Gulf War and his defeat led to that resolution. Saddam was under
international control. You probably also remember the Iran-Iraq War where
the US provided satellite information on Iranian troops positions so they
could be targeted with WMDs. The US had no problem with WMDs being used by
Iraq in that one.