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

[Robert Lindauer]

bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au wrote:

> I've only had time to dip into some ongoing threads but I notice that 
> both Robert Lindauer and Dan Clemmensen have
> stated that they think that "we", meaning the US, or the Bush 
> administration, (I'm not part of any of those "we") deliberately lied 
> or misrepresented the reasons for invading Iraq.
>  
> Whilst I do tend to that view, I am not utterly convinced of it yet. 
> And yet it is an important fact, or otherwise, to establish or not 
> surely? One thing that I suspect most extropian or transhumanist list 
> posters might agree on, is that the Iraq and terrorism business has 
> grabbed a big chunk of the worlds attention. Attention that might have 
> been directed far more profitably (to the net human good) elsewhere.


$200,000,000,000 last count (in US spending, nevermind everywhere else) 
that easily could have built plenty of supercomputers into which we 
could have downloaded our minds :)  Hindsight is always 20/20 with 
investment opportunities though :(


> I wonder on what basis those that are convinced of it, are
> so convinced? Please, give only opinions based on hard facts.


The claim was that "we KNOW there are wmd's in Iraq" - this is what Mr. 
Powell said to the UN and Bush said to the American Public.  He (powell) 
is later quoted as having said in a briefing "I'm not reading this 
bulshit".  The question is why, if he KNEW it was bullshit, did he go on 
reading given that we obviously didn't know that there were weapons of 
the relevant kind there (otherwise, they'd be there, right?)  Or did he 
have further intelligence revealed to him.  If so, where is it?   I 
mean, if we KNEW where there were, we'd have found them.

Second, we KNOW that David Kelly was an active Iraq weapons inspector 
working for the UN and he said he KNEW they didn't have the weapons of 
the relevant kind, he "died mysteriously" for his say-so.  But we do 
know that he said so.

Third, we KNOW that the American CIA had briefed the president and had 
said they'd found no such evidence.

Fourth, we know that in fact Iraq didn't attempt to acquire any nuclear 
material in Niger, Bush blatantly lied to the public in the matter.  
Both the British and Americans knew that the intelligence on the matter 
was flatly false.

Fifth we know that the the British understood Bush's war effort as a 
trumped-up case from the Downing Street Memo and Downing Street Minutes 
the sources of which are not in question.

Sixth, we know that some of the President's and Vice President's very 
close friends are mysteriously making quite a lot of money in this 
effort, in particular Haliburton and Carlyle (through UDI) are doing well..

In sum, you can INSIST that this all adds up to conspiracy-theory 
bullshit because obviously anyone who opposed or opposes the 
administration's position in the matter is a 
nutso-commie-conspiracy-theorist OR you could say "well, there appears 
to be a significant amount of evidence that Bush really wanted to go to 
war and trumped up the reasons to do so."  But this wouldn't be a 
critical attitude but more of a dumb-ass attitude.  If you like this, I 
also sell land in southeast asia in my spare time.  It's normally valued 
at $50,000 but I could get it for you for $30,000 cash.

>  
> We all know that we can make up nonsense for ourselves we don't need 
> to do it for each other.
>  
> Brett Paatsch
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>extropy-chat mailing list
>extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat
>  
>