DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
Hans Blix is a liar and a wussie.
APP - Bush and Blair misled the public... yes, it's conceivable both could end up on trial
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Taichiliberal
Shaken, not stirred!
Yeah...the good ole International Court System :lol:..... International Court System is the second largest gay and lesbian organization in the world – second only to the Metropolitan Community Church.
Founded by Empress I Jose,....José Julio Sarria....... José considered - “why be a queen when he could be an empress?” So, he proclaimed himself the Empress of San Francisco.
For the love of God, man...GROW UP! A simple "you got the title wrong" would have sufficed.
OR
Maybe Mr. Chuckles Projecting again? Remember, YOU are inserting the LOL icon here, not me. means International Criminal Court (WHICH WAS SIGNED by CLINTON)
US President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC), just hours before the 31 December, 2000 signature deadline.
Which he stated while doing so that he would not submit it to the US Senate until the ICC court be evaluated. This made the signature an empty gesture, as Clinton was a lame duck President at the time. Once again, Slick Willy straddled the political fence.
(Republicans to the rescue)
Lucky for the US.... US Senator Jesse Helms, an active opponent of the court and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, denounced the action. "This decision will not stand," he said. "I will make reversing this decision and protecting America's fighting men and women from the jurisdiction of this international kangaroo court one of my highest priorities in the new Congress"
President George W. Bush's Administration sent a note to the UN Secretary General on May 6, 2002. The note suspended the signature of the US and informed the Secretary General that the US recognized no obligation toward the Rome Statute.
Helms is doing some quality time in hell for his career, and the Shrub was just following the script the PNAC laid out for him. Both were full of it, because the court goes after not only the military leaders for their actions, but the POLITICAL orchestrators that gave the orders as well. In short, a little SOB like Kissinger would have to look over his shoulder when ever cruising around South America or Asia.
And let's not forget that this country had NO problem with throwing international law out the window when it went after Noriega WITHOUT AN OFFICIAL DECLARATION OF WAR....removing by force a high official of that gov't. More recently, we've gotten into the habit of sand bagging foreigners off to secret locations and torturing them on the premise of wanna be bounty hunters and 3rd rate intel, only to release them days/months/years later without so much as an apology or reason.
Like I said, our own gov't can't even get a handle on this bullshit...so it's small wonder why they're scared shitless of the ICC, which has done much good in bringing criminals to justice.
But it was so funny, you mentioning the second largest gay and lesbian organization in the world...you and the homos, funny shit....
Thats the sort of thing that happens when you think you know more than you really do.....
Anyway, Clinton was an asshole for even signing the damn thing in the first place....though I'm afraid some idiot Democrat is sure to do it in the future too..
Going after after Noriega WITHOUT AN OFFICIAL DECLARATION OF WAR?
Wopdeedoo....kinda like our little skirmish with North Korea, right....
and it seems like only yesterday you were a big fan of "police action" like going after Noriega.....something about AQ and Taliban....?
We have nothing to fear from the likes of the ICC....not nearly as much as we have to fear from the fuckin' Democrats in this country...
And " sand bagging foreigners off to secret locations and torturing them "
Its called 'rendition'.....
If it was good enough for Clinton and Berger the Burglar, its good enough for me.....If you did some homestudy, you'd be aware of that fact......
TuTu Monroe
A Realist
You are trying to divert the attention to Bush and Blair away from the incompetent boob in the White House. Pathetic.
'Bush and Blair misled the public... yes, it's conceivable both could end up on trial'
So why hasn't UN weapons expert Hans Blix been called to give evidence at the Chilcot Inquiry?
By Tim Shipman and David Jones
Last updated at 8:31 AM on 05th December 2009
Devastating critique: Former UN weapons expert Hans Blix says Bush and Blair showed 'very bad judgement'
Tony Blair and George Bush were orchestrating a witch-hunt against Saddam Hussein that ended with the Iraq War, according to a former UN weapons inspector.
Hans Blix said the two leaders behaved like 17th century witchfinders in their willingness to oust the dictator.
In an interview with the Mail, he revealed that Mr Blair tried to force him to change his mind about the absence of WMDs in Iraq to placate the Americans.
The former Swedish diplomat, who headed the UN weapons inspection team in the run-up to war, concluded that Mr Blair and Mr Bush 'misled themselves and then they misled the public'.
He said: 'They were convinced they had their witch in front of them, and they searched for the evidence and believed it without critical examination.
'I'm not saying they acted in bad faith [but] they exercised very bad judgment. A modicum of critical thinking would have made them sceptical. When you start a war which cost thousands of lives you should be more certain than they were.'
Mr Blix dismissed the 'dodgy' Downing Street dossier on Saddam's weapons which made the case for war as 'a politician's twist'.
The claim that Iraq could fire chemical weapons in 45 minutes was 'hyperbole'. Mr Blix's inspectors viewed 700 supposed WMD sites in the months before the war but found nothing more than a handful of empty chemical munitions.
Five weeks before the invasion he revealed these findings to the UN and six days later Mr Blair told him his report had undermined American support for the UN process.
But Mr Blix stuck to his guns and warned the former prime minister not to invade, telling him: 'It would prove paradoxical and absurd if 250,000 troops were to invade Iraq and find very little.'
The 81-year-old said Mr Blair could have slowed the rush to war had he wanted to.
'If the UK had really insisted then on the UN path being exhausted, they could have slowed the military build-up ... but that wasn't the case,' he said. 'They eventually had so much military in the Gulf that they felt they had to invade.'
Obsessed: In an exclusive interview with the Mail, Blixen said George Bush and Tony Blair were guilty of misleading themselves and then the public
Mr Blix accused Mr Blair of 'legal tap-dancing' by claiming that existing UN resolutions gave the green light for war.
He added: 'The war, in my view, was illegal, yes. The British knew the evidence [of weapons] was thin, and they should have remembered that before they started shooting.'
Asked whether Mr Blair could be tried for war crimes, Mr Blix said: 'Well, yes, maybe so. Well, we'll see. It's not very likely to happen.'
Mr Blix said he would have been happy to testify to the Chilcot inquiry into the war but had not been asked to attend.
The inquiry heard yesterday that British troops were deliberately put in greater danger in order to increase Mr Blair's influence with the Americans.
Lieutenant General Sir Anthony Pigott, a former deputy chief of the defence staff, said Britain committed a 'meaty' land force in the hope that it would buy influence.
'You buy that on your contribution and your willingness to put - not just boots on the ground - people in danger,' he said. 'They know you are a serious player.'
The chances of Gordon Brown being called to give evidence increased yesterday when the inquiry heard he had refused to release additional funds to rebuild Basra following the invasion.
The claim was made by diplomat Dominic Asquith.
Judgment day: Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein in downtown Baghdad in 2003
As a Swedish diplomat, Hans Blix is a man who chooses his words very carefully and very sparingly. But as he searches for the right way to describe the behaviour of Tony Blair and George Bush, as they prepared to wage war on Iraq, there is no mistaking the depth of feeling behind his analogy.
They were, he says, 'like witch-hunters of the 17th century' - men who were so desperately seeking to justify the invasion on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, that they were deaf to reason and blind to logic.
'They were convinced they had their witch (Saddam) in front of them, and they searched for the evidence and believed it without critical examination'.
The result, says the former UN weapons inspector, was that Blair and Bush 'misled themselves, and then misled the public.
More...
- DAILY MAIL COMMENT: How Blair bullied his way to an illegal war
- PETER MCKAY: Will Tony Blair ever go on trial after the Chilcot Inquiry?
- U.S. ignored British attempts to improve 'dire' post-war planning in Iraq, claims British diplomat
- British officials ruled against 'illegal' ousting of Saddam, Iraq inquiry told
'I'm not saying they acted in bad faith (but) they exercised very bad judgment. A modicum of critical thinking would have made them sceptical. When you start a war, you should be more certain than they were.'
This is devastating analysis from a man who, perhaps more than any other, knows how deeply flawed the evidence that led Britain and America to war truly was.
When they began the search, in November, 2002, it was clear that he and his inspectors faced a daunting task.
They were despised by the Iraqis, who were affronted by their presence, and mistrusted by hawks in the Bush administration, who regarded them as hopelessly ineffectual (vice-president Cheney openly dismissed them as 'useless').
But in his unfussy, methodical way, Dr Blix - a Cambridge-educated international lawyer - was determined to investigate as thoroughly as possible whether Saddam really did possess germ warfare capabilities, as the British and Americans insisted.
As Dr Blix recalled, when we spoke this week in his Stockholm apartment, adorned with exotic artworks and colourful rugs, this sometimes necessitated almost farcical cat-and-mouse games.
'They misled the public... yes, it's conceivable both could end up on trial'
For at first the Iraqi escorts were determined to obstruct the inspectors at every turn. 'We would gather outside our base and say we were going in one direction, then after driving off we would abruptly change tack, so they never knew where we were heading.
'We also ensured that our daily targets, such as military installations or laboratories, were never transmitted directly from New York (where the inspectors were based), and we never used ciphers or telegrams. All the information was sent by courier.'
Despite these difficulties, by the following March they carried out some 700 inspections at 500 sites where, according to western intelligence and other supposedly reliable sources, WMD were suspected to have been stored.
And for all their efforts, they had found nothing more than a handful of empty chemical munitions.
This was not the conclusive proof that Dr Blix sought, of course, because, as he points out, it is almost impossible to prove that something does not exist.
Nonetheless, it suggested that Iraq may not have any WMD, much less the capability to strike the West at 45 minutes' notice, as the British Government had claimed months earlier in its infamous 'dodgy dossier'.
In an address which now seems laudably cautious and prescient, he aired his views to a packed meeting of the UN Security Council, precisely five weeks before the invasion, urging that his team be given more time to complete their search.
'I was not talking about days or weeks, nor about years, but a few more months,' he says.
Six days after he delivered his speech, however, he received a phone-call from Tony Blair.
The Americans had been deeply disappointed by his report, which had undermined their faith in the UN process, intoned the British Prime Minister.
Ready to testify: Despite his high profile, Hans Blix is yet to be called to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry into the war
Clearly hoping to convince Dr Blix he was being over-accommodating towards Saddam, Blair added that it wasn't only the British and U.S. intelligence services who felt sure that weapons really did lie hidden in Iraq. The French, Germans and even the Egyptians concurred.
Unlike others subjected to Blair's persuasive powers, however, Dr Blix stuck firmly to his position. 'It would prove paradoxical and absurd if 250,000 troops were to invade Iraq and find very little,' was the essence of his response.
Except for one chance encounter at a climate change meeting in Sweden last year, when they shook hands and exchanged a few pleasantries, that uncomfortable conversation almost seven years ago was the last they have had.
Given that Dr Blix possesses such a wealth of knowledge about the behindthescenes chicanery that precipitated the invasion, we might have expected their paths to cross again during Sir John Chilcot's inquiry, which began last week.
Blair is due to give evidence early next year. But, thus far at least, the weapons inspector has not been called even though, at 81, he still travels widely on speaking engagements, recalls the events of 2002/3 with formidable precision, and would certainly make a compelling witness.
Instead, he is following every twist of the inquiry online (when I arrive he has just finished reading more than 100 pages of testimony provided by Blair's former foreign policy advisor Sir David Manning).
So what would he tell Chilcot, were he to appear? The question prompts a three-hour discourse broken only when an apologetic Dr Blix suddenly heads for the kitchen, apologising that he has forgotten to offer me tea.
Evidence: Press scramble around Blix as he arrives in Bagdad in 2003
For one thing, he says, it should have been perfectly plain to Blair months before the war that the 'intelligence' on which he placed such great store was risibly inaccurate.
There were many reasons to suspect this, not least the disclosure that a contract which purportedly proved that Niger had sold Iraq 'yellow cake' - concentrated uranium powder used to make nuclear weapons - was a forgery.
Dr Blix also takes issue with a statement made at the Chilcot inquiry this week by Sir David Manning. He told the hearing that Dr Blix's team had examined ten of 19 sites named by British intelligence and 'turned up some quite interesting stuff'.
But the weapons inspector says he ought to have been asked what 'interesting' really meant.
'Yes, they led to interesting results, that's true - but never to WMD. We found a few documents and some conventional weapons - grenades and so forth - nothing more.
'The message that should have gone to the intelligence services was that your sources must have been bad. If your sources are bad in these cases, maybe they're bad in others.'
Then there was the dodgy dossier. In 2004, finally forced to withdraw its utterly fallacious 45-minute claim, Jack Straw informed Parliament that the dossier had been shown to Blix in September, 2002, and he 'shared' the intelligence service's fears.
However, it later emerged that Dr Blix had only seen the dossier before it was ' sexedup' on Alastair Campbell's instructions. And this was, of course, long before his team had set foot in Iraq.
In any case, Dr Blix now disputes that he ever gave the dossier his blessing. 'I read it only casually because it was something that would have been fed to our inspectors to see what they thought, and we had no comment at all about that,' he recalls.
As the crisis escalated, Dr Blix says, it was as though Bush had set in motion a 'train' which was hurtling pell-mell towards conflict. Blair was very much a passenger on this train, but at least he wanted to keep the UN on board.
Switching metaphors, he says it was as if two clocks were ticking at very different speeds - and while his inspectors were working methodically to one in an effort to avert bloodshed, Bush was racing towards conflict by another.
One of Dr Blix's major criticisms of Blair is that he failed - or did not even try - to slow Bush down, so that the Americans and British and the UN at least marched in synchronicity.
For had he been given just three more months in Iraq, he is convinced, he could have ended any realistic doubts about the existence of WMD - and then not even Bush and his neocons could have sustained a case for war.
Instead, as the massive military build-up continued, he and his team were given just two days notice to leave Baghdad before Operation Iraqi Freedom began, and by June, after tidying up loose ends, he had left his position.
However, he says he knew for certain soon after the occupation that Saddam had no chemical or biological weapons. For by then Iraq's military scientists and administrators were free to speak, and knew they would have been rewarded for leading the coalition forces to WMD sites. But they couldn't do that - because they didn't exist.
Disgracefully, however, it took the British and Americans months to admit that they weren't there, and it wasn't until January, 2005, that the U.S. announced that the search had finally been abandoned.
WMDs? We found none. Just papers, and grenades'
How did he feel when the troops poured in, I asked him. 'Sad, sad, sad,' he replies. 'A failure. The majority of UN members wanted more inspections, and they declined to authorise a war that shouldn't have taken place.'
His only consolation was the knowledge that he and his team had tried, and kept trying to the eleventh hour to provide the evidence needed for a peaceable outcome.
'What would the world have thought if the UN had given the green light for war? The inspection would have been discredited; the UN would have been discredited. So in that sense it was a victory for critical thinking and professionally searching for facts.'
He is in no doubt that war was prosecuted unlawfully, then?
'The war, in my view, was illegal, yes. Assume that Saddam had obstructed the inspections: then it's conceivable that the Security Council would have authorised it. They might have said, yes, he's threatening the peace.
'The British knew the evidence [for the existence of weapons] was thin, and they should have remembered that before they started shooting.
'If you think your wife is being unfaithful, and you shoot her, but then find out you were wrong, it is no use claiming that you thought you were right at the time. You are still guilty.'
Were Blair and Bush guilty of war crimes, as their fiercest critics maintain? 'Well, some people...' he begins, then stops himself, adding after a lengthy pause: 'That would have to be tested by tribunal before you established it. I'll leave that for others to decide. I'm not conducting any campaign.
'But you have to be aware that the U.S. and UK acted on authorisation from Congress and Parliament.'
And what if Congress and Parliament had been deliberately misled? 'Well, I have never said they acted in bad faith; that they knew there were no WMDs. As I say, the expression I would use is that they misled themselves, and then misled the public.'
Later, when I invite him to put on his lawyer's gown and ponder whether a criminal case might be possible, he asks: 'Well, who would sue them? Before what tribunal?
'Bush, at least, could not be tried before the International Criminal Court in the Hague because the U.S. is not a signatory to it. But I wouldn't say it's impossible. A national tribunal maybe.'
Ravaged: War has had a devastating effect on Iraq since the invasion in 2003
So Blair could conceivably stand trial at, say, the Old Bailey? 'Well, yes, maybe so. Well, we'll see. It's not very likely to happen.'
Moving back to more comfortable ground, he says that Blair has been tried by the court of public opinion. After the war he fared badly in local elections, and ultimately he relinquished the premiership. Dr Blix is also convinced that it was lingering anger over his rush to war alongside Bush that cost him the presidency of the European Union.
'You had France and Germany who were against the war. They wouldn't take lightly to it, but I'm sure there were also other reasons.
'I don't think they wanted such a flamboyant figure, and I think that's right. They were really looking for a chairman rather than a president - to keep things on an even keel.
'But there would be fairly deep feelings [about the war]. I think there's an attempt to say that this is behind us; we need a patched-up Europe. But still, here was a guy who was very firmly on the other side, and on the U.S. side.'
With the conversation drawing to a close, he leads me into his and shows me his favourite cartoon, mounted on the wall.
It depicts a frustrated George Bush holding a bomb fuse in one hand and vainly trying to strike a match on Dr Blix's bald head with the other.
'Look - he seems so frustrated, and I'm just sitting there, all stubborn,' he chuckles, 'I think that perfectly sums it up.'
His life has now moved on, he tells me, and these days he spends almost as much time lobbying for nuclear energy - his favoured solution to climate change - as he devotes to the abolition of nuclear weapons.
However, the Chilcot inquiry has clearly reawakened so many memories, and he is not one to stand by and watch history being distorted.
Sir John would only need to lift the phone and - much to Blair's discomfort - the man who warned him about the absurdity of going to war on a false premise would board the next London-bound plane.
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Taichiliberal
Shaken, not stirred!
But it was so funny, you mentioning the second largest gay and lesbian organization in the world...you and the homos, funny shit.... If you say so, because until you told me I wasn't even aware that such an organization existed. Hey, whatever floats your boat...
Thats the sort of thing that happens when you think you know more than you really do..... No, it's called not remembering the proper name of something...happens to all us on occasion...honest adults anyway. And I never claimed to be a know-it-all, I've just proven to know more than you on certain topic from time to time, and that seems to just grate on your mind.
Anyway, Clinton was an asshole for even signing the damn thing in the first place....though I'm afraid some idiot Democrat is sure to do it in the future too.. Your opinion, which you're entitled to. Like I said, it was classic Slick Willy, because it looks good but means nothing, as I previously explained (which you missed).
Going after after Noriega WITHOUT AN OFFICIAL DECLARATION OF WAR?
Wopdeedoo....kinda like our little skirmish with North Korea, right....
and it seems like only yesterday you were a big fan of "police action" like going after Noriega.....something about AQ and Taliban....?
Let's have a little refresher course in recent history. You had a military incursion into a country to extract a gov't official...no declaration of hostilities, no running it by the UN, in order for the foreign official to stand trial (and conviction) in our courts! I used this example to demonstrate how the US used beyond the pale tactics to do what essentially the ICC wanted to do with international consensus and diplomacy. If you had PAID ATTENTION to what you read, you would have noted that I NEVER condoned what that action in Panama (either that or you are puposely lying about what I wrote) The Korean War was described locally by the US as a "police action" because the essentially the "war" was the U.N.'s baby (and America's part of the U.N.) You had UN nations involved. I hope that clears things up, and prevents you from responding with something stupid.
We have nothing to fear from the likes of the ICC....not nearly as much as we have to fear from the fuckin' Democrats in this country...
Of course we don't....WE DIDN'T SIGN ON! And since we have a military and nuke ability to make everyone back off, we don't have to. So Kissinger, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfowitz, Feif, and the boys can all relax, because the wall of jingoistic BS is firmly in place against the world. And the only thing we have to fear from Dems is them repeating the whishy-washy BS they did for the last 8 years when the neocon GOP ran things...which unfortunately seems the case.
And " sand bagging foreigners off to secret locations and torturing them "
Its called 'rendition'.....
Tell it to the poor bastards that were snagged by some local johnnies with a tribal axe to grind and turned over to Gitmo and Abu Gharib for a pay day...jailed and interrogated (or tortured) for YEARS and then kicked loose with no compensation or even a public apology. Tell it to the poor bastard that got snatched in Germany, "renditioned" to some hole where he got tortured, and then kicked loose a week or so later, with nothing but denial to meet his charges. Do you think they honestly give a rat's ass about semantics?
If it was good enough for Clinton and Berger the Burglar, its good enough for me.....If you did some homestudy, you'd be aware of that fact......
You consistently give half assed and distorted accounts of recent history, use absurd comparisons, which I have to correct (as I did above) and then you either avoid acknowledging or meet with repetition or more ass backwards historical analogies...so you're the LAST person to accuse me of not knowing a subject. Unlike you, when I'm proven wrong, I'll admit it.
I never condoned or approved actions that Slick Willy did which are on par with the last 8 years, and you cannot provide any quotes where I did....and the Berger incident has NOTHING to do with Iraq. Once again, you display your impotent intellectual bravado.
You consistently give half assed and distorted accounts of recent history, use absurd comparisons, which I have to correct (as I did above) and then you either avoid acknowledging or meet with repetition or more ass backwards historical analogies...so you're the LAST person to accuse me of not knowing a subject. Unlike you, when I'm proven wrong, I'll admit it.
I never condoned or approved actions that Slick Willy did which are on par with the last 8 years, and you cannot provide any quotes where I did....and the Berger incident has NOTHING to do with Iraq. Once again, you display your impotent intellectual bravado.
You could have saved yourself a lot of time and typing and just said, "Thanks for pwning me again".....
You do have a talent for giving a long winded speech to say absolutely nothing of consequence....and denying things that were never said in the first place....
Did you fancy yourself a big deal on AOL?...Here you're nothing....
Do you really thing the readers don't notice your lame spinning and tap dancing....? Whatever....
Taichiliberal
Shaken, not stirred!
Folks, you notice how this buffoon deteriorates to the rantings of a frustrated high school freshman when he can't BS his way past or honestly, logically and factualy refute what I state? By doing so, he avoids actual debate and discussion.
[ame="http://www.justplainpolitics.com/showpost.php?p=564193&postcount=26"]Just Plain Politics! - View Single Post - APP - Bush and Blair misled the public... yes, it's conceivable both could end up on trial[/ame]
Once again, he proves how intellectually impotent and bankrupt he truly is. "Bravo" indeed.
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USFREEDOM911
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN
He was the same wall flower on AOL, that he is here.
DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
Libby's one of the lamest here because he takes himself so seriously.
He has a serious case of LBMS and all you here are going to pay for it.
DamnYankee
Loyal to the end
LOL I'm not paying for it. It's enjoyable watching him bash his head against the wall, with a puzzled look on his face, trying to figure out where the pain is coming from.
SouthernBelle82
New member
I guess you fell asleep in history class with Nuremberg and the invasion and occupation of Poland. Same thing different "leaders" and country. It's about justice and doing the right thing. Maybe you need to remember what that is. Of course you right wingers only care about power since that's what you ended on. Not about justice.
SouthernBelle82
New member
Yep. I think the only way Bush will see inside a court room on this, or any of them, is if Blair brings them in kicking and screaming. I don't think he's going down a lone. He'll bring someone with him.
SouthernBelle82
New member
And being gay means what exactly?