Quote (Lebanon961 @ Apr 3 2022 11:21am)
They didn't "get it wrong", they flat out lied to everyone: most government officials, the people of America and the world, the UN, etc.
most people know this but just dumping the below for reference purposes for people that dont read or watch the news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_GunGun's regular job at GCHQ in Cheltenham was to translate Mandarin Chinese into English.[5] While at work at GCHQ on 31 January 2003, Gun read an email from Frank Koza, the chief of staff at the "regional targets" division of the American signals intelligence agency, the National Security Agency.[7]
Koza's email requested aid in a secret operation to bug the United Nations offices of six nations: Angola, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Chile, Guinea, and Pakistan. These were the six "swing nations" on the UN Security Council that could determine whether the UN approved the invasion of Iraq.[8] The plan might have contravened Articles 22 and 27 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which regulates global diplomacy.
Gun was outraged by the email, and took a printed copy of it home with her.[5] After contemplating the email over the weekend, Gun gave the email to a friend who was acquainted with journalists.[5] In February, she travelled to London to take part in the demonstration against the impending invasion of Iraq.[5] Gun heard no more of the email, and had all but forgotten about it until Sunday 2 March, when she saw it reproduced on the front page of The Observer newspaper.[5] Less than a week after the Observer story, on Wednesday 5 March, Gun confessed to her line manager at GCHQ that she had leaked the email, and was arrested. In a BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman, she said that she had not raised the matter with staff counsellors as she "honestly didn't think that would have had any practical effect".[9] Gun spent a night in police custody, and eight months later was charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act.[5] While waiting to hear whether she would be charged, Gun embarked on a postgraduate degree course in global ethics at Birmingham University.[5]
On 13 November 2003, Gun was charged with an offence under section 1 of the Official Secrets Act 1989.[10] Her case became a cause célèbre among activists, and many people stepped forward to urge the government to drop the case. Among them were Reverend Jesse Jackson, Daniel Ellsberg (the US government official who leaked the Pentagon Papers), and Congressman Dennis Kucinich.[11]
The case came to court on 25 February 2004. Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer evidence.[12] At the time, the reasons for the Attorney-General to drop the case were murky. The day before the trial, Gun's defence team had asked the government for any records of legal advice about the lawfulness of the war that it had received during the run-up to the war. A full trial might have exposed any such documents to public scrutiny, as the defence was expected to argue that trying to stop an unlawful war of aggression outweighed Gun's obligations under the Official Secrets Act. Speculation was rife in the media that the prosecution service had bowed to political pressure to drop the case so that any such documents would remain secret.[12] A government spokesman said that the decision to drop the case had been made before the defence's demands had been submitted.[12] The Guardian newspaper had reported plans to drop the case the previous week.[13] On the day of the court hearing, Gun said, "I'm just baffled in the 21st century we as human beings are still dropping bombs on each other as a means to resolve issues."[12] In May 2019 The Guardian stated the case was dropped "when the prosecution realised that evidence would emerge ... that even British government lawyers believed the invasion was unlawful."[14]
In September 2019 Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said the dropping of the case against Gun was not to stop the Attorney General's advice on the legality of the Iraq War from being revealed. He stated that Gun would not have received a fair trial without the disclosure of information that would have compromised national security. Gavin Hood, the director of Official Secrets, expressed scepticism about Macdonald's statement and called for the declassification of the official documents referred to by Macdonald.[15]
Quote (Goomshill @ Apr 3 2022 11:18am)
I'd still really like to know what's actually going on in Ukraine. Because it still doesn't make much sense
Other people doubted the warnings of invasion based on some thought of sanctions pressure or oligarchs holding sway or whatever. It seemed to me the biggest part of the calculation would be the question- why? What does Putin stand to gain? Most of Ukraine's natural resources and productive farmland are already in the separatist regions under Russia's sphere, whereas West Ukraine is mostly a true shithole, the poorest region of the poorest country in Europe. Was there some real goal in mind that could only be accomplished taking the whole country instead of the just the best cut of it? Then even when Russia did invade, they encircled major cities and basically stalled out. So at that point and on, we know Kiev was threatened but never actually being flattened. Lets not pretend otherwise, Russia clearly has the conventional weapons power to wipe out a city like Kiev. The allies had far lesser technology in WW2 and look at the bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Hamburg, etc. If the goal was to massacre everyone, they easily could. But instead we see Kiev is intact enough it still has all major infrastructure and utilities functional. Water, gas, electricity, internet, etc. But we also saw the siege and bombardment of Mariupol, far harsher. So the presumption there was that Russia was making an example of one city, chosen for its far-right contingent, and use that to convince other cities to surrender or face the same fate. But then Russia withdrew from Kiev. So clearly, that's not the case. And its not like Putin is some humanitarian afraid of killing innocent people, look to the atrocities we see in the wake of the Russian withdrawal from Irpin, the slaughter there. And yet, for everything that's happened, the gas is still flowing through Ukraine, from Russia to the EU. The pipelines haven't been shut down or attacked. The Ukrainians are still permitting it. Why? Nord Stream II has been frozen and abandoned, but Russian gas still flows. For all the geopolitical manuevering to literally go around ukraine's transit leverage, that's seen no action so far this war.
what is currently going on in Ukraine is Russia is putting as much pressure on Ukraine for them to give in to Russian demands.
This post was edited by ferdia on Apr 3 2022 04:42am