<I see.

The "threat" has been removed, and We the People aren't to be allowed to see the evidence?



Who exactly needs to see WMD - and who would really know what they are seeing anyway. I could take thirty commercial drums and put arabic warning signs on them, drop them off and say they were WMD - and how many really would know the difference? Sure it may comfort a few folks to see everything that is being extracted, but there really is no need to see other than to comfort the masses politically.


The unprecedented control of which you speak has other names: cover-up; censorship; withholding of evidence.



It's one thing to conceal ongoing operations. It's another to "conceal" their results. Especially when so many people believe that the results are precisely what is currently being reported: one big fat goose-egg.



That's the very thing...the situation in Iraq is ongoing. We have Kurds restless in the north, Iran sponsored fundamentalists passing from borders to the east and a whole regime to chase down that melted away into the night with money, weapons, WMD and everything but the kitchen sink.

Unless, of course, the objective here is to distract people from remembering that this was ostensibly the reason we hit them first before they could hit us.

No need to distract. The long drawn out escapades and UN performances would be hard to forget for anyone. Anyone who tells you we went in just to liberate Iraqis is lying. We really didn't give a darn about them - we went in to kick Saddam's behind out - and that we did.

Saddam was dangerous - anyone who has access to Iraq's oil wealth with sadistic and antisocial tendencies, a previous reactor complex to their name and previous stockpiles of WMD is a threat.


Before you mention the World Trade Center and the Pentagon attacks as an example of the first strike, please provide the evidence for the connection. Oh, it's classified? Pfft. Oh, they're all Muslim?

The whole "planet" concept with different nations is basically a free-for-all. I have a book on my shelf, Treaties in Force - January 1, 2002 which the US State Department sends me each year, listing all the treaties which we have entered into with every nation of the world. We have a total of 12 treaties in effect with Iraq, all meaningless fluff (i.e visas, extradition, cultural, expedited mail service, etc.), none of them were about refraining from attacking them first if we dislike their belligerent plane-targeting behavior and psychopathic leadership.

Wars and laws do not mix well. In the real world the victor of a conflict writes the laws and prosecutes the defeated.

There is no such thing as a first strike - there are simply deteriorating relations which lead to war. Pearl Harbor was not a first strike but the expected outcome of our assistance to Britain against the axis powers. Our attack on Iraq is the result of a completely deteriorated relationship with Saddam and his dictatorship.

Our attack on Iraq was no more of a first strike than was our bombing of Hiroshima. Neither Japan nor Iraq had successfully attacked our mainland and had only really attacked our machines of war (planes, ships, etc.) The intent of the both governments was clearly hostile - only in 1941 the Japanese were better at hitting our craft than were the Iraqis of 2003.

That may actually be closer to the truth behind the Administration's rationale, but time will tell.



To say that the Administration is not lying about the WMD, and then to say "but nobody's going to give details to the likes of you, you moron civilian citizens of the US, you" is, not to put too fine a point on it, obnoxious, autocratic, and (if evidence indeed exists to support the Administration's position) stoopid.



Oh, the details will be given eventually - nothing like that stays bottled up forever. How long, will depend upon the circumstances - I can assure you we will see some of the results well prior to the next election! A ballpark estimate would be that before September we have our first detailed public release of a WMD site clean up and confiscation.


When in doubt, hide behind Executive Privilege and that big Classified sign. Perhaps the evidence exists after all, but it's being kept in the White House basement "in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in an unused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"*



Where's my towel?

Regards--
Mary Anne



LOL MA!

No, only I am publicly discussing classification. They are simply discussing finding the weapons and feigning ignorance through cryptic and carefully worded PR soundbytes.

If you listen very closely you will notice that they don't say:

"We have not found any WMD."

But rather it is intended to appear like we have not:

"We'll find them," Bush said. "It'll be a matter of time to do so."

That statement works for omitting the negation of past-tense discoveries as well as projecting continued discoveries.

One simply has to learn to speak DC-double-talk!

;-)

SDAI-Tech1