Letters to the Editor
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The Hilarious Thing About That Insipid Editorial...
... is the tone of "Why is the IAEA hassling Pakistan? Just because it's a nuclear power and has sold technology to every rogue state imaginable? Please! Let's focus here!"
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Fred "Screech" Hiatt
Didn't Fred play Screech on "Saved By the Bell"?
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slam dunk!
wasn't Ledeen involved in getting those forged documents from "Niger" to Italian intelligence? Or am I thinking of another right wing traitor?
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Glenn, don't you know the score?
The fact that Michael Ledeen doesn't speak Persian and has never set foot in Iran is an asset. He isn't poisoned by any of that "understanding" and "cooperation" jazz.
The less you know about something, the better qualified you are!
Unless it's something like insider trading or some crime Bush is guilty of. Then it's terribly complicated business you'd never understand.
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Look at the funding
So all these warmongers work for various "think tanks". Like the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, etc. Where do they get their funding? I bet mainly from defense contractors. Since their funding comes from military contractors, their job is to advocate for war. Fred Hiatt, Michael Ledeen and the rest of them are nothing mroe then employees of the military-industrial complex. They just work in different branches of it. What's amazing is they think Americans are so stupid, we don't see how they just recycle the same arguments over and over. Country (fill in the blank) is at war against us. Country (fill in the blank) is in league with Al-qaeda.
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Don't forget John Bolton
Recently, he called El Baradei an apologist for Iran.
Was on the BBC, perhaps it's youtubed somewhere. And here's an older Newsmax article where he made the same claim.
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/5/24/150617.shtml
Just worth pointing out his position as another connection between the Neocon ideas factory to the executive branch.
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Thank You Glen
Glenn, you're rapidly becoming a national treasure!
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"Ask Scott Ritter ..."
... and, while you're at it, ask him what he did with that $400,000 he got from Saddam.
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Crossing the Rubicon -- war with Iran
Chris Hedges (War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning)said on "Democracy Now" several months ago, that he intended to stop paying income taxes if the U.S. invades Iran. Now this is, to me, how a patriot acts.
There are only a few people with this kind of courage, and of course, we all have perfectly good reasons not to join the tax resisters: we have parents, kids, dogs, cats, etc. We're too young or we're too old, too rich, too poor. We do important work that might be interrupted. But ultimately, we need to face the fact that if we continue to pay our taxes, we are enabling the U.S. war machine. Pure and simple. What we do about that is between each of us and our own conscience.
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Lie about Ritter:
Ask Scott Ritter ..."
... and, while you're at it, ask him what he did with that $400,000 he got from Saddam.
This, of course, is a complete lie. But whatever else is true, the documentary produced by Ritter about Iraq's weapons program contained the truth, whereas the sources undoubtedly revered by this commenter were spewing nothing but falsehoods.
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Borrowing from the Nazis
If you wonder about the source of the incredibly insane and absurd neoconservative mantra:"Islamic terror represents an existential threat to the US", look no further than the Nazi mantra:"The Jew represents an existential threat to Germany". They borrowed every single word from Nazi propaganda and changed only the source of the "existential threat". And the neocon ranks are crawling with bonafide psychopaths, just like the Nazi leadership.
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If Hiatt's Rant Sounds Familiar...
...It's because it is a virtual replay of his March 11, 2003 slander of ElBaradei and Blix. The editorial is attached below in its entirety.
Keep in mind that Hiatt's insistence that Iraq was not cooperating in the inspections process came a mere four days after Blix reported the following to the United Nations:
"In matters relating to process, notably prompt access to sites, we have faced relatively few difficulties...Initial difficulties raised by the Iraqi side about helicopters and aerial surveillance planes operating in the no-fly zones were overcome. This is not to say that the operation of inspections is free from frictions, but at this juncture we are able to perform professional no-notice inspections all over Iraq and to increase aerial surveillance...The Iraqi side has tried on occasion to attach conditions, as it did regarding helicopters and U-2 planes. It has not, however, so far persisted in these or other conditions for the exercise of any of our inspection rights. If it did, we would report it."
Here's Hiatt's pre-war attack on ElBaradei and Blix:
Are Inspections Working?
Tuesday, March 11, 2003; Page A22
THOUGH THEY RECOGNIZE that Iraq has not complied with the United Nations Security Council's last and supposedly "final" disarmament order, a number of governments nonetheless have suggested that the U.N. arms inspections should continue. Reports by the chief inspectors last week, they say, showed progress: Saddam Hussein has destroyed a few dozen illegal missiles and become incrementally more cooperative in other areas. The inspectors suggest that if they are allowed to proceed, they might be able to complete their work in a few months. So why not extend their mandate, as France, Russia and Germany propose, rather than launching a war?
The answer to this reasonable-sounding question is not that the U.S. and British troops poised on Iraq's borders cannot be kept waiting, or that weather or some other factor dictates immediate action. In fact, if a delay of a few weeks, now being explored by Britain as part of a compromise formula for a new Security Council resolution, would serve to overcome the current rift in the council, or at least add to the international coalition confronting Iraq, then it would be worth the wait. But it's important to understand that any extension of the inspectors' mandate would only delay, not prevent, a conflict. That's because the three months of inspections so far have demonstrated what arms control experts have been saying all along: that without a strategic decision by Saddam Hussein to fully cooperate, it is not possible even to locate Iraq's most deadly weapons, much less ensure disarmament.
That Iraq's dictator has failed to make that decision has been obvious since Dec. 8, when he submitted a declaration to the Security Council asserting that he had no chemical and biological arms. You don't have to listen to the Bush administration to regard that as a lie; even French officials say they believe Iraq still has those arms. The declaration served to detach the inspection process from reality. The inspectors have been put in the position of verifying that Iraq has no weapons -- by definition an impossible task -- rather than overseeing the destruction of those that exist. The only exceptions are the few score surface-to-surface missiles that Iraq could not avoid declaring -- but the lethality of these arms is minor compared with the probable hidden stores of anthrax, sarin and VX nerve agent.
So why do the inspectors sound so upbeat? Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix and International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei are international civil servants who are desperate to prove that agencies like theirs can be effective. Their reports to the council have been constructed as arguments for continued inspections, rather than as reports on Iraq's compliance. Mr. Blix has dodged repeated requests that he judge Iraq against the terms of Resolution 1441; instead, he has retailed indications of "progress" on such issues as interviews with scientists, which in turn are hailed by some as proof that the "inspections are working." Such discussions have a surreal quality, because they ignore the elephantine fact that Iraq has still not disclosed its weapons. Mr. Blix doggedly pursues "unanswered questions" about huge stores of unaccounted-for materials -- but in reality, his team has little of substance to do. It can only wait to see if Iraq will be more forthcoming, or hope for a lucky break that will lead it to hidden stockpiles.
Mr. ElBaradei has responded to similar problems by turning on Iraq's accusers. In his first report to the council, Mr. ElBaradei argued against the logic of Resolution 1441, saying that inspectors could be used to contain Iraq even if Saddam Hussein didn't cooperate. He has used his two subsequent presentations to dispute evidence offered by Britain and the United States, while coming close to declaring Iraq free of any nuclear program. Last Friday, Mr. ElBaradei made headlines by denouncing one secondary piece of evidence, about an alleged Iraqi attempt to obtain fissile material from Niger, as a forgery. But the allegation is not central to the case against Saddam Hussein, and it did not even form part of Secretary of State Colin Powell's recent presentation to the Security Council. Such diversions have lamentably become the substitute for U.N. oversight of real Iraqi disarmament; weeks or even months more of them may help unify the international community, but can yield little else.