[extropy-chat] Who thinks the Bush admin lied over Iraq? On whatbasis?

[Robert Lindauer]

Brett Paatsch wrote:

> The political systems we (you, me, all of us) are mired down in are the
> systems that we must work with as facts.


No, we must dilligently work to change them and when they don't work for 
us anymore, we must destroy them.

>
> The United States, the United Nations, existant systems of laws, these
> are constructs that human beings have made. They are natural things.


You have a deranged sense of "natural thing", these things aren't even 
concrete things, much less natural.

>
> In the broad sweep of evolutionary time and then historical time these
> constructs mark points of human progress and delineate challenges
> not yet overcome.

Reasonable.

>
> There are reasons, evolutionary and historical, why perjury and
> oathbreaking became important to people and became dealt with
> in our (in human) laws. There was a reason why the constitution was
> written with impeachment procedures placed in it.
>
> It was not so that President's would be pestered by people that didn't
> like some part of their personal politics it was because the President
> is a role that has enormous power and trust in it.


Yes, it was to control their political power, that includes pestering if 
that's the only recourse that someone has. 

>
> President's of any political persuasion that break their oaths emperil
> their own people and jeopardise the progress that is encapsulated
> in the best constructs of government that humans have so far
> managed to build.



>>  If Bush were a scientist publishing a paper on WMD we'd call it a 
>> lie. But I think it very probable that Bush believed Iraq had WMD.
>
>
> Whether he had a good faith belief or not is now it seems to me the
> only question that remains to be answered.


Why does it matter.  Either he deliberately lied or is a complete 
idiot.  Either way, time to go.

>> Practically everyone did, including me.  You can say we were all, 
>> including Bush, fooled by a self-deceiving intelligence system for
>> which Bush was partially responsible; but the fact remains, we 
>> believed it at the time.
>
>
> I didn't believe it. I didn't form a belief either for or against, I 
> reserved
> judgement.
>
> But what I believed or thought or what you believed or thought isn't
> the point.  The point is was President Bush's belief a *good faith*
> one or not. Did he *knowingly* break his oath as President? That is
> something that evidence can be collected on.  That is a matter
> intellectually no harder to determine that for a jury to determine
> whether a person who has committed what appears to be a crime
> did so intentionally or acted without intent to do harm.


Again irrelevant.  The conscious thoughts of a mass murderer are not 
essential to the comission of a crime.

> To make such judgements we look at facts.
>
> Brett Paatsch
>
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