Bush Admin. Cleared-Again

christiefan915 said:
Good Lord. Over 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, and that's a conservative estimate. But no, bush never targeted civilians. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time when we were bombing the shit out of the country.
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Twelve years of strategic bombing BEFORE the Iraq invasion.....that means infrastructure destroyed, and that means civilians. The ONLY journalist that took Slick Willy to task for participating in that strategy was Amy Goodman, and she was admonished by the "professional" press corp for being disrespectful.

To date, I have yet to read any scathing analogies of Daddy Bush's participation in that. Wonder why?
 
christiefan915 said:
Our troops are trained to withstand torture by waterboarding them, but waterboarding isn't torture? Then why train them?
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This word play by the neocons is really pathetic in light of the FACT that the damage has already been done. The Shrub and company released 500 "detainees" after years of "enhanced interrogation" techniques. No apology, no charges. Are they so self deluded to think that these folk went home and said, "It wasn't so bad....they waterboarded me to the brink of drowning several times over the years....I heard a guy died from that. Oh well, at least it wasn't "torture".

Could you imagine if an American soldier was given the same treatment by say the Cubans or North Koreans or Iranians, and the gov't officials of said countries held a press conference and said, "We didn't torture them, we just used enhanced interrogation techniques"? The wail from the neocon punditry would be heard on the moon!
 
christiefan915 said:
Good Lord. Over 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, and that's a conservative estimate. But no, bush never targeted civilians. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time when we were bombing the shit out of the country.
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????....the vast majority of those 100k were killed by Iraqis setting off bombs in marketplaces, not by Allied forces.......just go to sites like iraqbodycount and look at the cause of death they list for each casualty.....
 
Cypress said:
How long was he able to endure the waterboarding?

3.5 seconds

After which, crying like a baby, he made them stop waterboarding him.
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then it would appear to be an excellent tool for gathering information......no physical injury, scares the crap out of the party involved.....a win, win situation......
 
PostmodernProphet said:
????....the vast majority of those 100k were killed by Iraqis setting off bombs in marketplaces, not by Allied forces.......just go to sites like iraqbodycount and look at the cause of death they list for each casualty.....
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Now you've gone and ruined another crispy screed. The point being made isn't that Bush's Iraq policies did or didn't create actions that caused civilian casualties, but rather that Obama has greatly increased a policy (drones) into Pakistan known to have a high civilian casualty rate. Obama who was either stupid or purposefully being shrill himself when he claimed Bush was aerial bombing Afghanistan! The hypocrisy displayed by liberals would be humorous if not so blatant and arrogant!
 
PostmodernProphet said:
????....the vast majority of those 100k were killed by Iraqis setting off bombs in marketplaces, not by Allied forces.......just go to sites like iraqbodycount and look at the cause of death they list for each casualty.....
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Not quite.....you have to take into account deaths as a result of 12 years of "strategic bombing", then you have to take into account deaths by various spikes in cancers in areas heavy with DU dust. Then there are those nasty cluster bombs, people dying from lack of water, food, etc., after the local infrastructure was bombed out of existence. Even Iraqi body count concedes that there is a LOT of grey area regarding the results of the forementioned. And remember, we are talking cumulative here. So "vast majority" is somewhat of a distortion on your part. Check out the PDF on Iraq Body Count the dossier on civilian body count 2003-2005 thoroughly, and please just don't stop reading at the parts that you think bolster your claim.
 
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PostmodernProphet said:
????....the vast majority of those 100k were killed by Iraqis setting off bombs in marketplaces, not by Allied forces.......just go to sites like iraqbodycount and look at the cause of death they list for each casualty.....
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<snicker> I know you think every US bomb was guided to hit enemies only with surgical precision, but that's just another right-wing fallacy. This article is from early 2008.

"The U.S. military conducted more than five times as many airstrikes in Iraq last year as it did in 2006, targeting al-Qaeda safe houses, insurgent bombmaking facilities and weapons stockpiles in an aggressive strategy aimed at supporting the U.S. troop increase by overwhelming enemies with air power...."

...The U.S.-led coalition dropped 1,447 bombs on Iraq last year, an average of nearly four a day, compared with 229 bombs, or about four each week, in 2006....

....The greater reliance on air power has raised concerns from human rights groups, which say that 500-pound and 2,000-pound munitions threaten civilians, especially when dropped in residential neighborhoods where insurgents mix with the population....

...On Thursday morning in Arab Jabour, southeast of Baghdad, the U.S. military dropped 38 bombs with 40,000 pounds of explosives in 10 minutes, one of the largest strikes since the 2003 invasion. U.S. forces north of Baghdad employed bombs totaling more than 16,500 pounds over just a few days last week, according to officers there...

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/nejm-2009/
 
PostmodernProphet said:
I have....that's why I was able to point out her error.....perhaps you should look at them yourself before you make up any more data.....here, let me help you....

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/incidents/page444

let me know what page you get up to before you hit 5k let alone 100k......
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FYI I've been following Iraqbodycount.com since its inception, and unlike you, I do read beyond the first page. Righties have excoriated IBC from the start so your quoting their numbers to boost your argument is suspect. Any source that doesn't have a RW slant confirms that thousands of Iraqis were killed by U.S. "surgical" (ha ha) strikes and their destructive aftermath, but you point to current data only and try to extend it back to 2003.

Only a total bonehead could think that the US-initiated invasion followed by years of bombing and destruction weren't the main cause of citizen deaths since 2003.

I really expected you to support Tommy Franks' comment "we don't do body counts" rather than trying to spin data from an anti-war site like IBC.

"For Iraqi females, and children, events involving air attacks and mortar fire were the most dangerous. In air attacks causing civilian deaths, 46% of victims of known gender were female, and 39% of victims of known age were children. Mortar attacks claimed similarly high proportions of victims in these two demographic groups (44% and 42%). By comparison, 11% of victims across all weapons types were Iraqi females, and 9% were children. The authors argue that their findings showing that air attacks (whether involving bombs or missiles) and mortars killed relatively high proportions of females and children is further evidence that these weapons should not be directed at civilian areas by parties to conflict because of their indiscriminate nature. As co-author Professor John Sloboda of Royal Holloway, University of London, who is also a co-founder of IBC, notes, “Our weapon-specific findings have implications for a wide range of conflicts, because the patterns found in this study are likely to be replicated for these weapons whenever they are used.”

1 Full NEJM article.

The authors conclude that “Policymakers, war strategists of all persuasions, and the groups and societies that support them bear moral and legal responsibility for the effects that particular combat tactics have on civilians — including the weapons used near and among them.”
 
Taichiliberal said:
Not quite.....you have to take into account deaths as a result of 12 years of "strategic bombing", then you have to take into account deaths by various spikes in cancers in areas heavy with DU dust. Then there are those nasty cluster bombs, people dying from lack of water, food, etc., after the local infrastructure was bombed out of existence. Even Iraqi body count concedes that there is a LOT of grey area regarding the results of the forementioned. And remember, we are talking cumulative here. So "vast majority" is somewhat of a distortion on your part. Check out the PDF on Iraq Body Count the dossier on civilian body count 2003-2005 thoroughly, and please just don't stop reading at the parts that you think bolster your claim.
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What a misguided maroon he is. Just when you think you've heard it all.... :palm:
 
webbway said:
:lol:

Just another long list of disappointments for the leftist wing nuts. They thought Bush & Cheney would be impeached and arrested, but that never happened. This was their last attempt to see somebody punished and it failed.
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Gee, I wonder what happened to the thousands of emails that "went missing" when the JD was trying to investigate this situation?

Must have been a computer glitch; we know the bushies would never deliberately and illegally destroy government records, especially those pertaining to such a sensitive subject.

Oh well, maybe they'll turn up, just like the other 22 million missing bush WH emails that were recovered two months ago.

Large batches of e-mail records from the Justice Department lawyers who worked on the 2002 legal opinions justifying the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation techniques are missing, and the Justice Department told lawmakers Friday that it would try to trace the disappearance.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who leads the panel, angrily demanded to know what had happened to the e-mail files, and he noted that the destruction of government records, including official e-mail messages, was a criminal offense. He said the records gap called into question the completeness of the department’s internal reviews of the work done by the lawyers in the Bush years.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which spent more than four years investigating the handling of the legal opinions about interrogation policies after the Sept. 11 attacks, pushed to get access to a range of e-mail records and other internal documents from the Justice Department to aid in its investigation.

But it discovered that many e-mail messages to and from John C. Yoo, who wrote the bulk of the legal opinions for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, were missing. The office disclosed the missing messages in a footnote to its final report, which was released last week.

“We were told that most of Yoo’s e-mail records had been deleted and were not recoverable,” officials from the Office of Professional Responsibility said in the footnote.

Also deleted were a month’s worth of e-mail files from the summer of 2002 for Patrick Philbin, another Justice Department lawyer who worked on the interrogation opinions. Those missing e-mail messages came during a period when two of the critical interrogation memos were being prepared.

Mr. Yoo’s lawyer, Miguel Estrada, said Mr. Yoo had left the Justice Department by the time the Office of Professional Responsibility had begun its review and “has no basis for knowing whether e-mails are gone or why.” In pursuing the matter, Mr. Leahy is “simply chasing his tail and feeding far-left conspiracy theories,” Mr. Estrada said.

Mr. Philbin did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

Mr. Leahy said the disappearance of the e-mail messages raised “serious concerns about government transparency and whether the Office of Professional Responsibility had access to all the information relevant to the inquiries.”

The original interrogation memos “were intended to provide a golden shield to commit torture and get away with it,” Mr. Leahy argued, but he said questions about how the memos were developed and what role the White House played may go unanswered.

Mr. Leahy also noted that 22 million missing e-mail messages from the Bush White House were recovered just two months ago, including batches of communications that had been sought by the judiciary committee as part of its oversight work into the 2007 firings of United States attorneys and other matters.

Gary Grindler, the acting deputy attorney general who represented the Justice Department at Friday’s hearing, said he did not think there was “anything nefarious” about the deletion of the e-mail messages, but he could not explain what happened to them.

He said he had directed administrative personnel at the Justice Department to review the situation and determine whether there were problems in the department’s system for automatically archiving internal documents. He said the review would also seek to recover the missing e-mail messages if possible.

In its final report, the Office for Professional Responsibility concluded that Mr. Yoo and his former boss, Jay S. Bybee, demonstrated professional misconduct in preparing the legal opinions that justified waterboarding and other interrogation tactics on Al Qaeda suspects in American custody.

The office’s findings were overruled, however, in another report released the same day by David Margolis, the associate deputy attorney general, who said Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee demonstrated flawed reasoning but not misconduct. Mr. Margolis rejected the Office of Professional Responsibility’s attempt to refer Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at Berkeley, and Mr. Bybee, a federal appellate judge, to state bar officials for possible disciplinary action.

Republicans on the Judiciary Committee appeared unconcerned about the missing e-mail messages and said that if the Justice Department were to continue investigating anything involving the interrogation memos, it should be whether officials at the Office of Professional Responsibility or elsewhere at the Justice Department improperly leaked details of the ethics inquiry to the news media over the last year.

Senator Jon Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee deserved “the thanks of a grateful nation for their service,” not accusations, and that the leaks had done “irreparable damage” to their reputations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/us/27justice.html
 
PostmodernProphet said:
I have....that's why I was able to point out her error.....perhaps you should look at them yourself before you make up any more data.....here, let me help you....

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/incidents/page444

let me know what page you get up to before you hit 5k let alone 100k......
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From your OWN website:

Iraq Body Count:

"We have always been quite explicit that our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position, because of gaps in reporting or recording. It is no part of our practice, at least as far as our published totals are concerned, to make any prediction or projection about what the "unseen" number of deaths might have been."

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/lancet100000/
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In short, YOUR OWN link says that they state - with absolute certainty - that their numbers UNDER ESTIMATE the true death total.


Iraq Body count only tabulates deaths that are reported in newspapers and media accounts, or confirmed by morgues and hospitals.

Lots of people die in war zones, who either don’t make it into a newspaper report, or are not tabulated by hospitals and morgues.


That’s why the ultimate death totals in war zones rely on scientific probabilistic methods which estimate/extrapolate the true death totals.

No one ever questions the scientific probabalistic methods used to estimate the number of deaths in the Congo, or the Rwanda, or other third world conflict zones. These are the same scientific methods used in Iraq by Lancet and others.

The only reason you have singled out the scientific methods uses in Iraq for your NeoCon blatherings, is because you LOVE George Dumya Bush. He’s like your boyfriend, or something. You have a compelling need to defend him with every fiber of your being.
 
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