Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Yahoo! News - Bush Chides Kerry for Iraq Explosives Talk
All of you out there thinking of voting for Kerry better take note of his actions in this case. The man has no morals, he'll say whatever he has to to get votes. Then when Bush calls him on it, his campaign labels it a political response and a negative attack. Give me a break.
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3 comments:
I’m not saying I support Kerry. I think both the democratic and republican choices for president are warmongering elitist hypocrites looking to improve life for the wealthy while leaving most of America up the proverbial creek. That said, 350 tons of high explosives have disappeared. 350 tons!
We can sit here supporting the rhetoric of the Commander-in-Chief whose men seem unable to locate a cache of explosives (much like the “weapons of mass destruction” that seem to have vanished off the face of the Earth, even if Cheney seems to think their still hidden somewhere). We can poke fun at the fact that Kerry’s own national security advisors don’t know where the explosives are either. Or, we can look at the root of the problem. This war was blatantly against international law and had nothing to do (despite attempts by our government to get us to believe otherwise) with 9/11; we entered Iraq without significant international support nor evidence to back our WMD accusations; we never located the WMDs that were meant to serve as justification for our actions; we jumped the gun in declaring major military operations in Iraq a success; we were never fully prepared to rebuild the nation we had every intention to destroy; and Iraq is not better off with Saddam Hussein out of power and an ex-CIA agent on occupation duty (despite the feelings of safety getting rid of the guy may cause some Americans). We are not there because it’s “…a dangerous place, full of weapons.” We are there because Bush needed a financially effective (for him, not most Americans) war that would boost his political outlook among the American people.
Bush continues, somehow, to make his biggest failure into some sort of success. I don’t know if Kerry would have handled it better, but it wasn’t his job to at the time. It was Bush’s job, and he failed. He hasn’t denied the 350 tons of explosives disappeared, he just said they could have been gone before troops (who were not ordered to even look for these explosives!) got there. How is that not incompetence? The one stash of weapons we know are there, and we avoid looking for them? I guess we were too busy hunting down Osama Bin Ladin… oh wait. He did attack America. He did threaten to do it again. He is a known terrorist. Yet, Bush doesn’t “spend much time thinking about him.”
If this is not incompetent and immoral, I don’t know what is.
For a blow by blow account of the explosives story, and the attempted spin from both sides, read the extensive notes, timelines and accounts at Talking Points Memo. It's liberal, but it's also accurate in reporting who said what and when. http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
The New York Times are on the trail of the missing explosives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/international/middleeast/28bomb.html
They don't come right out and say that the 350 tons of explosives were looted, but the conclusion can certainly be drawn from the evidence and interviews they have done.
Quote: "Looters stormed the weapons site at Al Qaqaa in the days after American troops swept through the area in early April 2003 on their way to Baghdad, gutting office buildings, carrying off munitions and even dismantling heavy machinery, three Iraqi witnesses and a regional security chief said Wednesday. The Iraqis described an orgy of theft so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters. ...
Two witnesses were employees of Al Qaqaa - one a chemical engineer and the other a mechanic - and the third was a former employee, a chemist, who had come back to retrieve his records, determined to keep them out of American hands. The mechanic, Ahmed Saleh Mezher, said employees asked the Americans to protect the site but were told this was not the soldiers' responsibility. ...
Mr. Mezher, the mechanic, said it took the looters about two weeks to disassemble heavy machinery at the site and carry that off after the smaller items were gone."
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