quote:

---

I don't see why having the UN's support is such a big deal...

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by HuwR

Well, since you are all bringing up references to WWII and how many people died, perhaps you should remember how it started and how many innocent people were put to death by a Mad man who people ignored until it was too late.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by drirene

I'll try to tackle this.
6. Was former CIA counter-terrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro wrong when he recently said there is no confirmed evidence of Iraq’s links to terrorism? Sadaam has not terrorized and murdered his own people? What about Kuwait? Additionally, according to Rumsfeld, there IS evidence that Al Quada was in Bhagdad.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by @tomic

I just couldn't let these go by:

quote:

---

11. Why are we taking precious military and intelligence resources away from tracking down those who did attack the United States- and who may again attack the United States- and using them to invade countries that have not attacked the United States? Because "a country" did not attack the US. A group of fundamentalists from different countries attacked the US.

---

Another painfully bad argument. We can't get the terrorists so let's just hit someone? I recommend anger management courses.
@tomic

---

quote:

---

The conversation has been something like this: (US) "Oh stop that! You stay here and you stay there and, by the way, give me some more oil please." (Small Animal) "So and so is in my face!" (swats at other SA) (Other SA) "Ouch! Hey! (US) "Both of you, stop it now!" (SA)"You want oil? Hehehe..." Etc.

---

quote:

---

As an Earthling, I'm saddened to see our world in this place.

---

quote:

---

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
--Albert Einstein

---

quote:

---

...
What about Iraq? Well, Bush and Tony Blair, who the London Financial Times recently described as the U.S. Ambassador to the world. The other press describes him in a little less complimentary terms--America's poodle and things like that. Bush and Blair have recently, just a couple of days ago, have repeated the standard line, of Clinton and others, that we've got to get rid of Saddam Hussein. He's such a criminal that he has even used chemical weapons against his own people. You heard that in Bush's presidential news conference a couple of days ago. And that's perfectly true, he did use chemical weapons against his own people, an ultimate crime. All that's missing is that he did it with the full approval of Daddy Bush, who continued to support him right through that period and beyond, as did Britain. They thought it was just fine for him to use gas against his own people, to develop weapons of mass destruction, which he was doing with the support of the United States and Britain, which continued, irrespective of his atrocities, because he was useful at that time.
...
So what is the reason? Well, I don't think it's very obscure. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia. It's been clear all along that the United States, one way or another, will find a way to regain control over those enormous resources, and it will certainly not permit privileged access to them on the part of its adversaries. France and Russia have the inside track now, and that's not tolerable. Maybe close behind them is***** Cheney, according to what I understand, who seems to be getting Iraqi oil into the country, but I don't know about that.

Anyway, France and Russia can't have privileged access. The U.S. has to take control over them. And, sooner or later, will do so, try to do so. They may regard this as a window of opportunity. However, it's not going to be easy. There's a lot of talk about the technical difficulty, but there's a much more fundamental one. Any regime change in Iraq has to be carried out in a way which ensures that it is not even marginally democratic, and there's a good reason for that. The majority of the population of Iraq is Shi'ite, and if they have any voice in a new regime, they might draw Iraq closer to Iran, which is the last thing the United States wants. The Kurds are going to press for some kind of autonomy, so that can't be allowed. It will drive Turkey berserk.
...
Just the last couple of days, again today, the United States is trying to convince, and apparently has convinced, Turkey to become the military force which will fight the war on terror in Afghanistan. Well, maybe that passes here, but everyone in the region, including Turkey--I just returned from there--including the regions most devastated by Turkish atrocities in the last decade. Everyone knows that Turkey's a leading terrorist state, maybe one of the worst in the world. And again, when I say Turkey, I mean the U.S. and Turkey. In the 1990s, in the area that I just visited, southeastern Turkey, the Kurdish areas, this is the site of some of the worst atrocities and "ethnic cleansing" of the 1990s. It was bad enough in the '80s, got much worse under Clinton. The U.S. supplied 80% of the arms. They peaked in 1997--1997 alone, more arms were sent to Turkey than the whole cold war period put together, up to 1984, when the counter-insurgency campaign began. A couple of million refugees, country devastated, tens of thousands of people killed. Far worse than anything attributed to Milosevic, in Kosovo before the NATO bombing.

Right through the late nineties Turkey became the leading recipient of U.S. arms in the world, after Israel and Egypt. And the atrocities included every imaginable form of barbarity and torture and terror you can think of. But none of it happened. None of it happened for the usual reason: we did it. Therefore, silence, out of history, and in this case, applause. So Turkey is lauded by the state department and the New York Times, front page stories by their terrorism expert, Judith Miller, and others, as providing a model for how to deal with terrorism.
...

---

quote:

---

...
Of the various potential military operations that you mentioned, the one that I think is serious is Iraq. Again, that has nothing to do with international terrorism.

The Iraq policy is also a kind of continuation, but it could change. They may consider this to be an opportunity to reestablish control over Iraq, which is extremely important. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, much of it under-developed or undeveloped. Saudi Arabia is the major one, Iraq is second, and it's substantial. It's estimated to be huge, way beyond the Caspian, East and Central Asian region. You can just be confident that the United States is not going to allow that to stay out of control and certainly not to fall under the influence of its rivals, like, say, France and Russia, which have the inside track now on Iraqi oil. So one way or another, the US will do what it can, and it can do a lot, to regain its control over those resources.

It has nothing to do with terrorism, it has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's atrocities. We know that for certain. The reason we know that is because, you hear Clinton, [British Prime Minister]Tony Blair, Bush and [former Secretary of State] Albright, and the rest of them talking about what a monster Saddam Hussein is, we can't let him survive, he used chemical warfare against his own population and he carried out major massacres and so on.

All of those charges are correct. But they're just missing three words, namely: with our support.

It's true, he carried out all these atrocities, developing weapons of mass destruction -- with our support. The US and Britain supported him, and continued to support him well after the atrocities, continued to provide him with technology to develop weapons of mass destruction, as they knew, at a time when he was really dangerous, much more dangerous in the 1980's when this was going on than today. So the charges are correct, but they're plainly irrelevant. And they're just pure deception. Unless one points out, yeah, he did all these horrible things with our support, then this is just worse than lies. So it's not because of his atrocities, its not because of terrorism, to which he may have connections or not. (they haven't even tried to show anything). It's in order to regain control of, primarily, the oil resources in a very rich area. And that involves a lot of complications.

It involves Turkey, for example. A very live issue in Turkey right now is whether to agree to US pressure for Turkey to provide the ground forces for an invasion of Iraq. [The US] have to have some kind of ground forces. They have nothing comparable to the Northern Alliance there and it's a much more substantial opponent. Turkey, of course, has a huge army, and according to discussion inside Turkey, and a little bit here, they are being pressured to agree to send their military forces in to take over northern Iraq, something which they have mixed feelings about. The negative side is that they're going to get a lot more Kurds under their control and they have plenty of problems dealing with their own Kurdish population, which they treat extremely ruthlessly -- with US support. That's how they can get away with it. The last thing they want is a bigger Kurdish population.

On the other hand, the positive side for them is that Turkey has always felt, with some justice, that what's called Northern Iraq should really be inside Turkey. A lot of the population is Turkish. The border between Turkey and Iraq was just established by the British. It had no meaning. It was established in order to ensure that Britain would keep control of the oil resources of Northern Iraq and that they wouldn't go to Turkey. The Turks aren't exactly delighted with this, obviously...

If Turkey takes it over, it means the US takes it over, because it's a client state, and the US would somehow take over the rest. You can be fairly confident that plans of that kind are being considered very seriously and might be implemented.

If the other [potential military actions] are implemented, I think it would be kind of like the Philippines, just for domestic purposes, to frighten the American population, make them huddle under the wings of the great hero who will defend us from evil and so on and so forth. That's a way to control people and to keep them from seeing what their great hero is doing to them, which is pretty ugly.

AGR: Speaking of the domestic front, many people have become concerned about threats to civil rights in the US as we engage in what seems to be an endless "War on Terror." The USA PATRIOT Act, passed by Congress in the name of "homeland defense," expanded the government's freedom to tap phones, detain suspects, monitor internet communications, and conduct secret searches, while at the same time reducing judicial oversight of such actions. Additionally, President Bush has passed an executive order to keep all presidential records since 1980 locked away, and Attorney Gen. Ashcroft has urged various federal agencies to actively resist Freedom of Information Act requests.

You've remarked a number of times that Americans have greater access to internal government records than perhaps anyone else in the world, a resource that is obviously very important in the work you do. What are your concerns regarding these issues of civil rights?

Chomsky: There are concerns. I'm less concerned about them than a lot of other people are, because I think there's too much resistance to it domestically. But one is certainly right to be concerned. One instantaneous reaction to Sept. 11, predictable and instantaneous, is that every harsh, repressive force in the world, virtually, regarded it as a window of opportunity to pursue their own agenda. So in, say, Russia, it meant stepping up their atrocities in Chechnya. In Turkey, it meant increasing repression against freedom of speech, particularly against the Kurdish population, and in Israel it meant sending tanks into refugee camps.

In the United States, Britain, India, and other such democracies, it means increasing efforts to control the domestic population. The elite groups in the political system, the economic system, and the ideological system despise democracy, for perfectly good reasons: they want to control things. They don't want the people to be involved. So, if they can find ways to marginalize the public and to protect state power from public scrutiny, they'll naturally use those methods, and the Bush administration is using them.

There's not unanimity within elite circles. This group that happens to be in power now is toward the more authoritarian, and, if you like, quasi-fascist, side of the spectrum. It's not new. The Reagan administration, for example...
...
So, yes, they're using this opportunity to try to protect state power from public scrutiny. That's part of trying to make the public more obedient and submissive. The so-called PATRIOT ACT, (anybody who looks at the name knows exactly what to expect) yeah, that's aimed at the same direction. They would like more control over people, more surveillance, more obedience, more fear, general marginalization. That's the way you can get away with that. You can ram through policies you know the public is opposed to.
...
So yes, they used the Sept. 11 opportunity to get that through and if they can keep the public ignorant and frightened and involved in something else, there are opportunities to do other things. Take what's called "privitization of Social Security," which they want desperately. That's extremely harmful to the general population. It's great for Wall Street. It'd be a bonanza for Wall Street. They'd have huge amounts of money on their hands. As far as the general population is concerned, it's a very chancy operation, much worse than plenty of other alternatives. For one thing, the whole Social Security crisis is mostly a fraud. In fact, they are trying to increase the Social Security crisis right now by sending the government deeply into debt with tax cuts for the rich and huge Pentagon spending, which is going to force them -- in fact they concede that there's no debate about it -- to deplete potential Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid funds. If they can drive the Social Security system into a crisis, which it is not in right now, they will be able to frighten people into handing it over to Wall Street. It's just going to make people at the mercy of the stock market, hardly a means of gaining security as Enron employees know very well.

But also it has a deeper purpose. Suppose you are a working person and your pension depends on what happens in the stock market. If you're concerned about your pension you're going to have to act in ways which support profits for major corporations because that's what your future depends on. In other words, you will be committed, throughout your life, to working against your own rights. You'll have to be committed to working against the rights of working people, poor people, union rights, labor rights, anything. You've got to be against that, because being against that is what increases profits for the rich, and your future is going to depend on profits for the rich. It's a terrific way to control people. In fact, that's probably its main purpose, to undermine possibilities for struggling for your own rights and for human rights in general. That's privatization of Social Security, and if they can manage to drive the perfectly sound system into a crisis, well, maybe they can push that through by appropriately frightening people, by the right kind of propaganda. It's possible. Those are the kinds of things [they don't] want people to pay attention to or to think about. What [they want people] to pay attention to is that there's a criminal on an island off the Philippines and our brave forces are helping attack.

---

quote:

---

Critics challenge new doctrine of interventionism

"Not In Our Name" petition drive still seeking online signers, will be published in newspapers nationwide


"President Bush has declared: 'You're either with us or against us.' Here is our Answer: Not In Our Name! Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression."

On September 19th a statement with these opening lines appeared as a full page ad in the New York Times. It has now been signed by over 10,000 people, among them former US Senator James Abourezk, filmmaker Robert Altman, composer and performer Laurie Anderson, Noam Chomsky, Ben Cohen, Mos Def, Steve Earle, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eve Ensler, Michael Franti, Terry Gilliam, Bill T. Jones, Barbara Kingsolver, Tony Kusher, Ozomotli, Susan Sarandon and Marisa Tomei.

Bush’s new National Security Strategy doctrine states that the US will take preemptive and unilateral military action..." to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States . . ."

Addressing President Bush, the statement declares, "We refuse to allow you to speak for all the American people. We will not give up our right to question...We refuse to be party to these wars and we repudiate any inference that they are being waged in our name or for our welfare."

In November Free Speech TV's Mobile-Eyes Project will provide a special weekend of coverage on the new American interventionism.

---

quote:

---

I've been admiring US because of their inspiration into high end science and technique, especially in the field of Space Explorations, Robotics, Computers, etc,

---

quote:

---

although I'm feeling sad because the advances are usually based on and used by the military

---