Quote (Jonathon @ Jul 10 2010 09:32am)
1. You disrespect people who willingly lay down their lives to defend your freedom of speech in whatever manner. You sir are a complete and utter failure at life. Additionally you go from knowing a few soldiers to many now, which is it, stop changing you story. Additionally if you actually had met these people doing all these things you should of reported it to the police because it was the "right" thing to do. However for someone sitting on a high and mighty perch trying to act like they know something about the essence of morality etc you failed at this simple thing. Don't ever get big unless you intend to attempt to follow your own philosophy even if it is flawed.
2. "We have killed massive amounts of civilians and switched from country to country destroying everything in our fucking path and justifying it by an attack that had nothing what so ever to do with the countries we are currently occupying lol."
The stats show we have killed far less than the massive amounts you are dictating, additionally Afghanistan was led by Al Qaeda as well as Iraq having strong ties to it as well as supported it financially.
Here is a simple article from the LA Times,
"Al Qaeda’s command base in Pakistan increasingly is being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network’s operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity.
The influx of money has bolstered Al Qaeda’s leadership ranks at a time when the core command is regrouping and reasserting influence over its far-flung network. The trend also signals a reversal in the traditional flow of Al Qaeda funds, with the network’s leadership surviving to a large extent on money coming in from its most profitable franchise, rather than distributing funds from headquarters to distant cells."
Iraq has strong ties to the terrorist groups, to deny it is quite dumb. Your statement that these countries have nothing to do with the attacks on the U.S are disproved so this here makes many of your arguments invalid.
3. " If Canada was a more powerful nation then us and they felt the need to just come over into the U.S because mexico bombed them would you be chill with them bombing and gunning down civilians? Or do you think just maybe you might start shooting back. Simple point and fact is every man and woman who enlisted knew what they were doing and who's lives they would be destroying by " Defending our country " . That is what makes the men and women of the military wrong, it's not the governments fault that they signed up last i checked we haven't had a draft in awhile. So defend the proud men and women of the military who knowingly and willingly kill off weak nation after weak nation for their natural resources."
American's died on 9/11, Americans still die over in Iraq as well as American civilians/Journalists. These men and women sign up to defend our country. Additionally even if we didn't find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that doesn't mean there wasn't a threat that justified on top of the terrorist ties there.
In a 2004 testimony for congress,
"As one of America's foremost weapons experts, Kay's public testimony this week before the US Senate Armed Services Committee is a must read for anyone with a genuine interest in trying to get closer to the truth of the matter.
Kay says the world is fast losing the battle to prevent the spread of the technologies involved in the production of weapons of mass destruction. Although Iran, Libya and Pakistan come immediately to mind, Kay estimates as many as 50 nations have either the capacity or aspiration to assemble these weapons. The global protocols to control WMD are all but moribund.
Against that backdrop, and given Saddam's regime had defied a series of UN resolutions demanding complete disclosure and disarmament, Kay argues that decisive action was not only necessary, but came not a moment too soon.
Kay rejects utterly the claim that intelligence analysts were pressured by their political masters to serve up only those conclusions that conformed with the need to prosecute the case for war. Why, then, did they get it so wrong?
His explanation involves a host of considerations, from reduced investment by the US on sound, old-fashioned human intelligence, to the difficulty of keeping track of events inside closed societies such as Iraq, as well as the pressure September 11 put on the US intelligence community to never again underestimate a threat.
But, as Kay stresses, to say there were glaring errors and miscalculations in intelligence assessments is not the same as saying there was no threat from Saddam's Iraq. Nor does it necessarily bolster the argument that UN weapons inspectors should have been left to get on with job.
Kay says his investigators have gathered first-hand from Iraqis involved in the weapons program evidence that was obscured from UN inspectors to the very last: "We have learned things that no UN inspector could ever have learned, given the terror regime of Saddam and the tremendous personal consequences that scientists had to run by speaking the truth ... I suspect regardless of how long they stayed, that attitude would have been the same."
From his own discoveries in Iraq, Kay argues there were multiple dangers posed by Saddam's regime. One was the capability to restart germ and gas warfare programs at relatively short notice, and threaten Iraq's neighbours.
The other was less overt, but more alarming. Kay argues much of the world does not understand the extent to which Saddam's regime, towards the end, had descended into little more than a "criminal terrorist conspiracy", and how this greatly increased the risk that the WMD know-how could be sold to other rogue nations, or extremists with evil intent: "I think the way the society was going, and the number of willing buyers in the market, that was probably a risk that, if we did avoid, we barely avoided."
Sadaam regime was nothing more than a terrorist filled country as well as him having the capacity to start up weapons for germ warfare. He used germ warfare in the past on his people, this has been proven. Also we know about his labs he had, so what if we didn't find the actual weapons. He had the capability as well as the desire to sell them. We narrowly avoided a travesty there. But even if you don't want to by into that I will concede that the original implications for going into Iraq may have been construed but that doesn't make the war any less necessary at this point in time.
4. [The National Intelligence Estimate report] reportedly concludes that, while al-Qaeda may have been weakened since the 11 September 2001 attacks, the radical Islamic movement worldwide has strengthened with the formation of new groups and cells who are inspired by Osama Bin Laden, but not under his direct control."
"The past five years have seen the USA engage in systematic violations of international law, with a distressing impact on thousands of detainees and their families. Human rights violations have included:
Secret detention
Enforced disappearance
Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
Outrages upon personal dignity, including humiliating treatment
Denial and restriction of habeas corpus
Indefinite detention without charge or trial
Prolonged incommunicado detention
Arbitrary detention
Unfair trial procedures"
I'll be one of the first to admit some of our policies that we have done are not a good thing, but that still doesn't justify your original premise that all people in service are bad etc. But if you want to talk about Human Rights Violations, I can bust some out that far outweigh whatever few ones we have done. We've detained hundreds, sure, we've done water-boarding as well as other "cruel" interrogation techniques. But these also throughout time have been shown to actually produce results. Unfortunately talking nice to someone is not going to get someone to give up whereabouts of terrorists.
Lets look at some Human Right violations Sadaam has commited that further justifies overthrowing him.
"From October 2005 to July 2006, Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants were tried for crimes against humanity in the first of several planned trials before the Iraqi High Tribunal (IHT) -- a judicial institution originally created by the Iraqi Interim Governing Council on December 10, 2003, and later approved by the democratically elected Iraqi National Assembly on August 11, 2005...
The first IHT trial, which was televised gavel-to-gavel in Iraq, dealt with allegations that Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants responded to a 1982 assassination attempt in the town of Dujail by attacking the inhabitants with helicopter gunships; destroying the town's farmland, date palm groves, and water supply; arresting 300 residents and interrogating them at torture centers where one-third died; interning whole families at a remote desert compound for four years; and referring the survivors to the Revolutionary Court where they were found guilty without a real trial, sentenced to death, and executed."
Additionally he was responsible for trying to commit Genocide. Genocide is by far one of the worse forms of oppression as it eliminates an entire race/religion/ideology.
Documents captured by the Kurds during the Gulf War [1990-1991] and handed over to the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch provided much information about Saddam's persecution of the Kurds. They detail the arrest and execution in 1983 of 8,000 Kurdish males aged 13 and upwards...
The Shia community, who make up 60% of Iraq's population, is Iraq's biggest religious group. Saddam has ensured that none of the Shia religious or tribal leaders is able to threaten his position. He kills any that become too prominent...
During the 1990's, Saddam pursued a policy of draining the marsh area of southern Iraq, so forcing the population to relocate to urban areas where it was less able to offer assistance to anti-regime elements and could be controlled more effectively by the regime's security forces. As an U.N. Environment Programme report put it -- 'The collapse of Marsh Arab society, a distinct indigenous people that has inhabited the marshlands for millennia, adds a human dimension to this environment disaster. Around 40,000 of the estimated half-million Marsh Arabs are now living in refugee camps in Iran, while the rest are internally displaced within Iraq.'"
In addition,
The campaigns of 1987-1989 were characterized by the following gross violations of human rights:
mass summary executions and mass disappearance of many tens of thousands of non-combatants, including large numbers of women and children, and sometimes the entire population of villages;
the widespread use of chemical weapons, including mustard gas and the nerve agent GB, or Sarin, against the town of Halabja as well as dozens of Kurdish villages, killing many thousands of people, mainly women and children;
the wholesale destruction of some 2,000 villages, which are described in government documents as having been 'burned,' 'destroyed,' 'demolished' and 'purified,' as well as at least a dozen larger towns and administrative centers (nahyas and qadhas);
the wholesale destruction of civilian objects by Army engineers, including all schools, mosques, wells and other non-residential structures in the targeted villages, and a number of electricity substations;
arbitrary arrest of all villagers captured in designated 'prohibited areas' (manateq al-mahdoureh), despite the fact that these were their own homes and lands;
arbitrary jailing and warehousing for months, in conditions of extreme deprivation, of tens of thousands of women, children and elderly people, without judicial order or any cause other than their presumed sympathies for the Kurdish opposition. Many hundreds of them were allowed to die of malnutrition and disease"
Whatever few humanity violations we have done are far outweighed by that bastard Sadaam. The benefits far outweigh the costs in this war. Not to mention you have yet to credit how building roads, schools, hospitals, getting electricity, running water, and building new houses for these people are a bad thing. The military people over there do not just fight, they help with these recovery efforts. Anyone can look for the bad in things, but in this case the good and the future good far outweigh what we have done.
Dear sweet Jesus that's a lot of text.