It just gets worse and worse for George Galloway.....

  • Thread starter LoafingOaf - American Psycho
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LoafingOaf - American Psycho

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It's looking more and more like one of the "anti-war" movement's primary leaders, George Galloway, is guilty as f*** of a crime against humanity.

From the April 25 Christian Science Monitor:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0425/p01s04-woiq.html
>>>>>>>>>>
Newly found Iraqi files raise heat on British MP
Documents indicate payments of more than $10 million for support of Labour Party official.
By Philip Smucker | Special to The Christian Science Monitor

BAGHDAD - A fresh set of documents uncovered in a Baghdad house used by Saddam Hussein's son Qusay to hide top-secret files detail multimillion dollar payments to an outspoken British member of parliament, George Galloway.

Evidence of Mr. Galloway's dealings with the regime were first revealed earlier this week by David Blair, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph in London, who discovered documents in Iraq's Foreign Ministry.

The Labour Party MP, who lambasted his party's prime minister, Tony Blair, in parliamentary debates on the war earlier this year, has denied the allegations. He is now the focus of a preliminary investigation by British law-enforcement officials and is under intense scrutiny in the British press, where the story has been splashed across the front pages.

The most recent - and possibly most revealing - documents were obtained earlier this week by the Monitor. The papers include direct orders from the Hussein regime to issue Mr. Galloway six individual payments, starting in July 1992 and ending in January 2003.

The payments point to a concerted effort by the regime to use its oil wealth to win friends in the Western world who could promote Iraqi interests first by lifting sanctions against Iraq and later in blocking war plans.

The leadership of Hussein's special security section and accountants of the President's secretive Republican Guard signed the papers and authorized payments totaling more than $10 million.

The three most recent payment authorizations, beginning on April 4, 2000, and ending on January 14, 2003 are for $3 million each. All three authorizations include statements that show the Iraqi leadership's strong political motivation in paying Galloway for his vociferous opposition to US and British plans to invade Iraq.

The Jan. 14, 2003, document, written on Republican Guard stationary with its Iraqi eagle and "Trust in Allah," calls for the "Manager of the security department, in the name of President Saddam Hussein, to order a gratuity to be issued to Mr. George Galloway of British nationality in the amount of three million dollars only."

The document states that the money is in return for "his courageous and daring stands against the enemies of Iraq, like Blair, the British Prime Minister, and for his opposition in the House of Commons and Lords against all outrageous lies against our patient people...."

The document is signed left to right by four people, including Gen. Saif Adeen Flaya al-Hassan, Col. Shawki Abed Ahmed, and what the Iraqi general who first discovered the documents says is the signature of Qusay. The same exact signatures are also found on a vast array of documents from the offices of the president's youngest son. The final authorization appears to be that of Qusay, who notes the accounting department should "issue the check and deliver to Mr. George Galloway," adding, "Do this fast and inform me."

An Iraqi general attached to Hussein's Republican Guard discovered the documents in a house in the Baghdad suburbs used by Qusay, who is chief of Iraq's elite Guard units.

The general, whose initials are "S.A.R.," asked not to be named for fear of retribution from Hussein's assassins. He said he raided the suburban home on April 8 with armed fighters in an effort to secure deeds to property that the regime had confiscated from him years ago. He said he found the new Galloway papers amid documents discussing Kuwaiti prisoners and Hussein's chemical warfare experts, and information about the president's most trusted Republican Guard commanders.

The documents appear to be authentic and signed by senior members within Saddam Hussein's most trusted security circle, but their authenticity could not be verified by the Monitor.

The British newspaper The Guardian raised possible questions about the first round of documents, including the possibility that while the documents could be real, they might include false allegations from which Iraqi agents could profit internally.

Galloway - a colorful Scot who is sharp of suit and even sharper of tongue - made regular visits to Iraq, and was dubbed by conservatives in Britain as an "apologist for Saddam Hussein." He once told the dictator, "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability."

In Parliament, Galloway, an MP since 1987 and a controversial figure, has championed the plight of Iraq, and blasted Blair for going to war in league with President Bush in his "crusade" against the Muslim world. He labeled Blair and Bush "wolves" for attacking Iraq, sparking a firm rebuttal from Blair, who called the remarks "disgraceful."

Galloway has vehemently denied he accepted any cash payments from the regime, initially, suggesting the documents may have been forged. The outspoken Labour Party member called earlier Daily Telegraph stories about his dealings a "smear campaign" against war opponents, and his lawyers have initiated legal proceedings against the newspaper.

Repeated efforts to contact Galloway, who is currently traveling in Portugal, were unsuccessful. No one answered at his House of Commons office, and his mobile phone was switched off.

David Blair, the British reporter who first broke the story, told the BBC: "I think it would require an enormous amount of imagination to believe that someone went to the trouble of composing a forged document in Arabic and then planting it in a file of patently authentic documents and burying it in a darkened room on the off-chance that a British journalist might happen upon it and might bother to translate it. That strikes me as so wildly improbable as to be virtually inconceivable."

According to the documents Blair found in the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, Galloway received money from Hussein's regime, taking a slice of oil earnings worth at least $600,000 a year. A top-secret memo sent by Hussein's spy chief requested that Galloway get an even-greater cut of Iraq's exports under the UN-sponsored oil for food program.

The document said that Galloway was profiting from food contracts, and sought "exceptional" business deals.

The most recent documents obtained by the Monitor suggest that payoffs may well have been made by checks in lump sums. The Iraqi general, who is familiar with financial dealings of Hussein's inner circle, said that checks of several million dollars could have easily been cashed in a bank on the ground floor of one of the President's most important palaces in Baghdad.

In a more recent Telegraph report based on a memorandum from May 2, 2000, Hussein is said to have rejected a request from Galloway for more money, saying his "exceptional" demands were not affordable.

The letter, found in the foreign ministry files, refers to the date and reference number of the intelligence chief's memo, which asked for Hussein's decision on Galloway's alleged requests.

That memo would have come nearly a month after one of the six letters - obtained by the Monitor - from Qusay's cabinet detailing a payment on April 4, 2000. That payment also references Galloway's "courageous and daring stands towards the oppressive blockade and in support of our courageous and patient people who violently oppose all enemies of Iraq and its leaders..."

Another payment authorization on July 27, 1999, states the money is being given upon "agreement of Sayid Qusay Saddam Hussein (the president's son) who has supervision over the Republican Guard." It calls the $1 million payment a reward for Galloway's support in trying to repeal the "unjust blockade on our beloved country and for his firm stand against the prime minister of Britain, the criminal Blair."

The two earliest payments, in July of 1992 and October of 1993, are noted down on green stationary as having already been delivered. For example, the October payment states, "kindly be informed of the issuing of a gratuity by the esteemed leader President Saddam Hussein (may Allah protect and guide him) to Mr. George Galloway in the amount of $600,000." It says the money was handed over to him by the representative of the directorate of the Special Security Organization, Colonel Shawki. Thursday, the US Marines had surrounded the house of Colonel Shawki. His neighbors said he might have already fled to Syria.

The general who gave access to the documents - General "S" - was until a decade ago a general in the regular Iraqi army but was attached to the Republican Guard. He was subsequently jailed on three occasions. He claims the government punished him because he is a Shiite, by assassinating his wife, three daughters, and one brother.

General "S" was determined to make up for his losses. What he really wanted back, however, was the deeds to the three homes taken from him. He planted his own driver as a spy in the guards of Qusay and followed the presidential paper trail when it moved to the suburbs in March.

On April 8, when US forces prepared to storm the capital, he rounded up six men who had served in prison with him and set out for the house.

He took possession of items including computer printouts that give the names, biographies, and residences of Hussein's most trusted Republican Guard officers. Also in the files is information on chemists who worked in the Iraqi biological-weapons program.

He also, unexpectedly, found documents discussing Kuwaiti prisoners still in Iraq and the ones that noted specific payments of money to Galloway. There was also a document detailing the biographies of Qusay's most trusted assassins.

One of The Monitor's interpreters was a fellow inmate of the general in Hussein's political prison. When the interpreter visited him several days ago, the general mentioned the documents he held.

The general had been most interested in discussing the Kuwaiti file. When the Monitor's reporter and the interpreter arrived to speak with him, he mentioned the Galloway material in passing.

• Mark Rice-Oxley contributed to this report from London.
 
The hatred of America is the socialism of fools

I must say I do like what I find on these British web sites.

This is a very interesting take on "yankee-phobia":

Full essay here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1055-536072,00.html

A couple money paragraphs:

>>>>
Why then do the myths of America the Hateful take such powerful hold? Because anti-Americanism provides a useful emotional function which goes beyond logic and reaches deep into the darker recesses of the European soul. In centuries past those on the Left who wished to personalise their hatred of capitalism, who sought to make it emotionally resonant by fastening an envious political passion on to a blameless scapegoat people, embraced anti-Semitism. It was the socialism of fools. Which is what anti-Americanism is now.

It should not therefore be surprising that those on the populist Right who share the Left’s antipathy towards the US are those, like the Austrian Freedom Party or the French National Front, who are heirs of anti-Semitic traditions. Nor should it be remarkable that the other tie which binds these allies of new Left and old Right together, the thread linking those such as George Galloway and Jörg Haider, is their hostility to Israel.
 
More on Saddam's British shill boy

Here's a rather harsh take on Galloway in The Sun:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2003181390,00.html

Check those photos of Galloway with his buddy, Saddam. Sickening is right!

>>>>
THE world has produced some evil, twisted men throughout history. Saddam Hussein is one of them.

Treacherous Labour MP George Galloway is another.

The so-called Honourable Member for Glasgow Kelvin emerged last night as the paid mouthpiece for one of the most despicable regimes of torture and mass murder in modern times.
 
Re: Oh yes, 'Christian Science Monitor' is a MUST read!

sarc.
 
Re: Ah yes, The Sun

You can believe EVERY word it prints. Not.
 
Re: Oh yes, 'Christian Science Monitor' is a MUST read!

> sarc.

That's a hard news story, dude, with new information adding to the Telegraph's excellent journalism.
 
Re: Oh yes, 'Christian Science Monitor' is a MUST read!

Don't call me 'dude'!
 
Re: The hatred of America is the socialism of fools

> I must say I do like what I find on these British web sites.

> This is a very interesting take on "yankee-phobia":

> Full essay here:

> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1055-536072,00.html A couple
> money paragraphs:
> Why then do the myths of America the Hateful take such powerful hold?
> Because anti-Americanism provides a useful emotional function which goes
> beyond logic and reaches deep into the darker recesses of the European
> soul. In centuries past those on the Left who wished to personalise their
> hatred of capitalism, who sought to make it emotionally resonant by
> fastening an envious political passion on to a blameless scapegoat people,
> embraced anti-Semitism. It was the socialism of fools. Which is what
> anti-Americanism is now.

> It should not therefore be surprising that those on the populist Right who
> share the Left’s antipathy towards the US are those, like the Austrian
> Freedom Party or the French National Front, who are heirs of anti-Semitic
> traditions. Nor should it be remarkable that the other tie which binds
> these allies of new Left and old Right together, the thread linking those
> such as George Galloway and Jörg Haider, is their hostility to Israel.
>

No one hates America. What they hate is useless wankers like you who just happen to live there and have nothing better to do than sit on their fat arses all day surfing the web in order to justify your insane fascist ramblings.
 
Re: Oh yes, 'Christian Science Monitor' is a MUST read!

> That's a hard news story, dude, with new information adding to the
> Telegraph's excellent journalism.

Will you please stop saying "DUDE". You make yourself sounmd like such a redneck twat.....having said that you are....carry on.
 
Re: Oh yes, 'Christian Science Monitor' is a MUST read!

> Will you please stop saying "DUDE". You make yourself sounmd
> like such a redneck twat.....having said that you are....carry on.

Where I come from, we say "dude" a lot. I like the word.

Redneck? Rather classist.

Now go back to your Andy Rourke mental retardation.
 
re: tard

Hmm. You labelled Tony Blair a "dictator" a few weeks back. I suppose it's frustrating for you to see Tony Blair so thoroughly vindicated, and his biggest critic exposed as apparently committing a crime against humanity.

Attack me all you like; I have thick skin and I smile knowing I've gotten under yours once again. It seems like a substancial % of the messages you post are just to attack ME.

And I suppose you're somehow posting messages *without* sitting on *your* ass? I'm gettin' well paid for the time on my computer; hope you are too.

As for having better things to do, aren't you the dope who came prancing on this board all proud of himself, to hype some "unmasking of an NME mole"? LOL!

Anyway, glad you're following my posts! : D
 
Question for Loafing Oaf

> I must say I do like what I find on these British web sites.

Does Canadian Mark Steyn have much of a profile in the US? He's always worth reading.

Why I nearly resigned

Mark Steyn says he is disgusted by what he sees as The Spectator's ill-judged and idle defence of the UN.


The UN should be appointed overseer of the peace not because that organisation possesses planning skills which America does not, but because to shut it out will cause resentment in the Arab world. However irritating are many of the do-gooders among its ranks, the UN has the advantage of being seen as an antidote to alleged Western imperialism.

After reading those words in The Spectator's leading article of 12 April, I hurled the magazine across the room and typed up my letter of resignation. A nervous dependant pointed out it might be wiser to line up alternative employment first. It quickly emerged that no other British publication would have me, and the only alternative employment was casual construction work. So let me try to explain instead why the heart sinks at finding a paragraph like that in what purports to be a conservative magazine.

The short answer is the official Russian response to the suggestion that UN sanctions should now be lifted, so that Iraqis can sell their oil and start rebuilding their country. 'This decision cannot be automatic,' says the Russian foreign minister with a straight face. 'For the Security Council to take this decision, we need to be certain whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not.'

Got that? Last month, the Russians were opposed to war on the grounds that there was no proof Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. This month, the Russians are opposed to lifting sanctions on the grounds that there's no proof Iraq doesn't have weapons of mass destruction.

There are a few striped-pants masochists in the State Department who enjoy this sort of thing and have spent the last four weeks pining for M. Chirac to walk all over them in steel-tipped stilettos one more time. But most Americans, given a choice between being locked in Security Council negotiations with the Russians, French and Germans or being fed feet-first into one of Saddam's industrial shredders, would find it a tough call.

In the week before The Spectator's demand that Kofi and co. be put back in the limelight, I'd devoted this space to suggesting why the UN was not the answer for postwar Iraq. While one is not so foolish as to believe the scales will be falling from Dominique de Villepin's eyes, one hopes one's argument might as least circulate as far as the magazine's editors. After all, that was also the column in which I opined on the progress of the war. 'We're still on Cakewalk Time,' I wrote. 'If Baghdad falls within the next seven to ten days, that's a quickstep cakewalk.'

Well, I was wrong. It was six days. But that still put me ahead of that issue's leader ('Now that coalition forces are digging in around Baghdad waiting for reinforcements...'), not to mention Julian Manyon ('We now know that The Plan - General Franks's plan, as Donald Rumsfeld has effortlessly started calling it - was based on a number of arrogant assumptions. It completely disregarded a key lesson of modern history - that invasions ignite nationalism, and that even the worst of tyrants may be preferred by many of his people to occupation by a foreign army.... Meanwhile, Saddam appears to be plotting an Arab Stalingrad'). In an issue brimming with an unintentional hilarity not seen since Alexander Chancellor's Falklands coverage, I was happy to do my bit to help maintain a few shreds of The Spectator's reputation.

A thank-you note and a box of chocolates would have been nice; a large raise and comprehensive medical coverage would have been better. But at the very least, instead of rushing on to their UN bromides, The Spec's editors might have thought, 'Hmm. Steyn was right on the war; maybe he's right on the postwar, too.'

You don't have to be a genius to see that, since 11 September, we have entered a transitional phase in world affairs. John Pilger can keep boring on about Vietnam until he's driven away every last Mirror reader, but to any sentient columnist the analogy is irrelevant: indeed, a canny newspaper would design a software programme that crashed a columnist's computer every time he typed in the word.

The Spectator is not motivated by anti-American animus, of course, and, unlike certain anti-war contributors to these pages, it was not on Saddam's payroll. But it's as prone as anyone to a slyer temptation: the seductive power of inertia in human affairs. The wish not to have to update one's Rolodex burns fiercely in the political breast. Brent Scowcroft, George Bush Sr's national security adviser, wanted to stick with the Soviet Union even after the Politburo had given up on it. The European Union was committed to the preservation of Yugoslavia even when there had ceased to be a Yugoslavia to preserve. Indeed, as Tim Congdon pointed out last week, Britain's own membership of the EU now defies any rational justification other than force of habit - which is a mighty potent force. As Polly Toynbee wrote to Peter Cuthbertson's Conservative Commentary website a couple of months back, 'War without the UN is unthinkable.' But it happened anyway. Imagine that.

Clinging to the status quo even as it's melting and dripping on to your shoes is one reason why the Middle East is now a problem. You'll recall G.W. Hunt's famous 19th-century music-hall song, the one that gave us a new word for the kind of militant patriotism most distasteful to the enlightened soul:

We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too....


What's often overlooked is what all this flag-waving was in aid of:

We've fought the Bear before, and while Britons shall be true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.


Why? Because the British coveted it? Not at all. Her Majesty's Government was interested in cherrypicking the odd isle and emirate - Cyprus here, Oman there - but, other than that, they were committed to maintaining the Ottoman empire: all that jingoistic rabble-rousing not for British glory but just to keep some other fellow's simpleton sultan on his throne. The Middle East is in its present condition in part because the European powers kept propping up the Turkish empire decades after it had ceased to be prop-up-able. It would have been much better for all concerned if Britain had got its hands on Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Arabia in the 1870s rather than four decades later. But, even in the later stages of the Great War, after the British had comprehensively sliced and diced Turkey from top to toe, London's official position was that somehow the Ottoman empire should be glued back together and propped up till the next war.

Now another Middle Eastern war has come and gone, and the bien-pensants are anxious that once again an obsolescent institution be glued back together and propped in position. This time it's the UN. The Spectator has it exactly backwards: it's not the irritating 'do-gooders' among its ranks, but the do-badders. The 'oil-for-palaces' programme (as Tommy Franks calls it) is a classic UN boondoggle: it was good for bureaucrats, good for Saddam's European bankers, good for George Galloway (allegedly), but bad for the Iraqi people. A humanitarian operation meant to help a dictator's beleaguered subjects has instead enriched the UN by more than $1 billion (officially) in 'administrative' costs. There's no oversight, no auditing, nothing most businesses would recognise as a legitimate invoice, and, although non-essential items can be approved only by the secretary-general himself, Kofi Annan has personally signed off on practically anything Saddam requested, including 'boats', from France. The UN, France, Germany and Russia are desperate to keep the oil-for-palaces programme going, and they figure they can bully the Americans into going along.

Before the war, it was said that, for America, the issue was Iraq and, for everybody else, the issue was America. Now the issue is the UN, France, Germany and Russia, and whether they can get away with hijacking the Anglo-American victory. You don't have to agree (though, as it happens, I do) with my distinguished compatriot George Jonas that the UN is a fully-fledged member of the axis of evil to recognise that there's little point in going to war to install yet another branch office of UNSCAM. If the problem is America's image in the Arab world, in what way does it help to confine the Stars and Stripes brand to unpleasant things like bombs, while insisting all the nice postwar reconstructive stuff be clearly labelled with the UN flag? If the answer is that that's the price you pay for healing the rift with Old Europe, that presupposes Old Europe is interested in healing it. Tony Blair may be keen, but the Continentals have different agendas. Will the Belgian government approve the complaint of 'genocide' against Tommy Franks? The petition accuses the general of 'inaction in the face of hospital pillaging', which apparently meets the Belgian definition of genocide. Unlike the deaths of more than three million people, which is the lowball figure for those who've died in the civil war in the Congo - or, as I still like to think of it, the Belgian Congo.

The Congo's civil war is everything George Mohammed al-Galloway claimed Bush's war would be: there were more civilian deaths in a few hours in Ituri province last week than in the entire Iraq campaign; while the blowhards at Oxfam and co. - the Big Consciences lobby - insist on pretending that Iraq is a humanitarian disaster, there's an actual humanitarian disaster going on in the Congo, complete with millions of children dead from disease and malnutrition. While the lefties warned that Ariel Sharon would use the cover of the Iraq war to slaughter the Palestinians, the Congolese are being slaughtered, and you don't need any cover. Because nobody cares. Because no Americans or 'Zionists' are involved.

That's why The Spectator should be wary of lending credence to phrases like 'Western imperialism'. There's no such thing. There's Belgian imperialism, which, as the Congo continues to demonstrate, is a sewer. And then there's Anglo-Saxon nation-building, which, from India to Belize, works quite well, given the chance. St Lucia, Mauritius, Tuvalu and Papua New Guinea, to pluck four at random, have enjoyed the attributes of a free society a lot longer than, say, Greece, Portugal and Spain, which were dictatorships a quarter-century ago. The argument of our old friend Ghazi Algosaibi, the Saudi minister of water, that freedom is 'European' is not borne out by the facts. If Latin Americans, Pacific islanders and even the Muslims of south Asia can live in liberty, it's surely a little racist to suggest that Arabs are uniquely incapable of so doing. Had Britain begun administering Mesopotamia in 1877 instead of 1917, we wouldn't even be asking the question.

But if you want to turn a long shot into a surefire failure, there's no better way than handing postwar Iraq from the Americans to the UN - the successors to the Belgian school of nation-building. At best, you'll end up with Cambodia, where the UN has colluded in the nullification of democracy; at worst, you'll wind up with the Balkans, where once functioning jurisdictions are reduced to the level of geopolitical tenements with the UN as slum landlord in perpetuity.

As my colleague Matthew Parris has written, there are today two competing philosophies, which he has characterised as America vs the Rest of the World. For the purposes of this argument, 'America' includes Australia, Poland and Qatar, but let's not quibble. The Rest of the World - the Franco-Russo-Belgian philosophy - has given us the oil-for-food programme, Hun Sen's UN-approved coup in Cambodia, and Congolese genocide. That's good enough for Belgium, but it shouldn't be for Britain and America. Washington should dare the French and Russians to veto, let the Iraqis turn on the spigots, and pay no attention to Spectator editorials




Steyn Online
 
From Private Eye

Sir,
This photograph of a commander of the Republican Guard reminds me strangely of George Galloway.
But I am sure that they cannot possibly be related.
ENA B. TUDOR,
Via email.




pic107765.jpg
 
Re: Question for Loafing Oaf

Well, just a couple months ago, the United States was saying war was necessary and that sanctions should not be lifted because they were certain that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's weapons were such a threat to world security that the Americans wouldn't even give the weapons inspectors thirty more days to finish up, even though they supposedly knew the exact locations of these weapons. See, the argument goes both ways. What's changed so much? Saddam may no longer be in power, but doesn't it make sense to lift the sanctions but not to make it a permanent move until it is proven that there are no such weapons in Iraq, especially given the rise of strong anti-American sentiment in Iraq? Or is it possible that there are no weapons of mass destruction and the United States always knew that this was the case? Yeah, very good, a tyrant is out of power. It's just too bad that the United States had to tell such blatant and pathetic lies in an attempt to give the action some semblance of legitimacy. It's even worse that now they aren't even following through with them. It's as though they expect everyone to forget about all these horrible weapons they told us the Iraqis have lying around. That many of us never believed them in the first place should make no difference. They keep saying what a threat Saddam was to world security. Now they should show us. Yes, his tyranny has been established. Where's his capability for mass destruction?
 
I am not denying that these allegations may be true (anything is possible), but I find it worrisome that people are so quick to rush to judgment. One would think (well, okay, hope) that the very fact that the British and American governments sought to legitimize war in Iraq through the use of forged, plagiarized, and otherwise falsified dossiers and documents would lead people to be a bit more critical.
 
Re: Question for Loafing Oaf

> Well, just a couple months ago, the United States was saying war was
> necessary and that sanctions should not be lifted because they were
> certain that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's weapons
> were such a threat to world security that the Americans wouldn't even give
> the weapons inspectors thirty more days to finish up, even though they
> supposedly knew the exact locations of these weapons.

When did they say they knew the exact locations? I recall America negotiated very hard for the requirement in 1441 that weapons inspectors have access - without minders, tape recorders, and so forth - to scientists and others who had knowledge of the WMD programs. This was just one of the many areas where Saddam breached 1441, his "final opportunity" to comply with his obligations.

>See, the argument
> goes both ways. What's changed so much?

My God! What's changed? The Saddam regime is out of power!! It's a pretty f***ing big change! The sanctions were placed on Saddam's regime.

And the argument does not go both ways. You see, Mindy, there's this other party involved, the Iraqi people. They need their country rebuilt NOW because their lives are at f***ing stake here. If one places the interests of the Iraqi people first, there is no argument, and those seeking to play games with the sanctions issue for their own power and money interests are acting immorally. Everything that should be done with respect to rebuilding post-war Iraq should be done with the interests of Iraqis placed above all other considerations.

As far as the WMDs, the UN documented they had them in 1998, and they have since been unaccounted for. It was Saddam's burden to account for them, which he failed to do. Due to Saddam's continued and total defiance of his obligations after 12 long years of diplomacy, the removal of Saddam's regime became a prerequisite to get to the bottom of it.
 
Re: Question for Loafing Oaf

> Does Canadian Mark Steyn have much of a profile in the US? He's always
> worth reading.

I've never heard of him, but that was a very good read!
 
> I am not denying that these allegations may be true (anything is
> possible), but I find it worrisome that people are so quick to rush to
> judgment. One would think (well, okay, hope) that the very fact that the
> British and American governments sought to legitimize war in Iraq through
> the use of forged, plagiarized, and otherwise falsified dossiers and
> documents would lead people to be a bit more critical.

Looks pretty bad for Galloway to me! But no, it hasn't been proven yet.
 
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