Al Jazeera, a beacon of objectivity in the Arab Media. I believe this report about as much as I’d believe a report on the front page of the National Enquirer.

Perri’s response is interesting.

Perri, what is it exactly that you doubt?

Actually, ABC is a far more credible news agency than Al Jazeera (although both rank far below most credible news agencies in transparency).

Judge for yourself:

http://www.icmpa.umd.edu/pages/studies/transparency/main.html

Well, ABC is far more credible than Al Jazeera. As for bias, all news sources are biased to one side or the other. ABC much less so than Al Jazeera, but about equally with Fox News. If you’d given the ABC link in the first place, I probably wouldn’t have said anything about the post.

Zorpheous — ignoring laws and treaties?

1. The Libby Conviction — Yes. He was guilty of lying to the grand jury (perjury). He was guilty of lying to two seperate FBI investigators. I submit to you though that at the time he gave his testimony, Patrick Fitzgerald already KNEW that it was Richard Armitage that leaked Valery Plame’s name. It had also been determined early on that she was not a true “Covert Agent”, and so no crime had been committed. Scooter Libby should not have even had to give any testimony at that point, so the crime was a process crime.

The Constitution of the United States grants the Executive Power of the United States ONLY to the President. The Executive power includes Law Enforcement, the enforcement of sentences, and the exclusive, non-reviewable right to grant pardons and clemency.

President Bush did not grant a Pardon, which would have erased the conviction. He granted clemency, which leaves the conviction and the taint of felony, but removed the jail sentence. That is hardly ignoring the law.

2. Prisoner of War Treaties. Do you by chance mean the Geneva Convention? Do you understand that Al Qaeda, and the Taliban were not signatories to the Geneva Convention? That it therefore did not apply to them in the first place?

Do you understand what the term “unlawful enemy combatant” means in relationship to the convention? It specifically deals with people engaged in hostilities on the battlefield that are not wearing the uniform of any recognized military. The United States could have LEGALLY had all of the detainees summarily executed on the battlefield, as has been done by other signatories to the Geneva Conventions.

3. Torture? You mean humiliation perhaps, which is far from true torture. Compare the acts of people like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who butchered his prisoners on videotape in hideous ways. The Nicholas Berg beheading video is still available on the Internet. THAT was torture, as well as pure barbarism.

Nothing that our Military or the Bush Administration has done even comes close to that.

Perri:

That was certainly a lengthy evasion of the core discussion point: the statement on the link between oil and the American invasion of Iraq. Care to throw up any more smoke? I think you should toss in something about the Clintons. That’s always good.

Virtually all foreign involvement in the ME is, at root, “about the oil”. That isn’t the same thing as the tinfoil hat belief that the US went into Iraq to seize control of the wells and pump them dry to fill its own coffers.

Balbulican at #9.
It wasn’t a smokescreen. It was a response to specific statements made by Zorpheous.

As for the core discussion point, while the stability of the world’s oil supply is always a consideration in the middle east, and may have been one of the motivating factors for the Australians, it was not even among the primary reasons that the U.S. went into the war.

There are 23 causes of action cited in the authorization to use force. The PRINCIPAL reasons that the U.S. went into the ware are as follows (from the AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ RESOLUTION OF 2002 (Public Law 107-243 — Oct. 16, 2002):

(this is not a quote, I reference the act itself in the link, these are highlights)
* Iraq, in direct and flagrant violation of the cease-fire, attempted to thwart the efforts of weapons inspectors.
* Public Law 105-235 (August 14, 1998) declared Iraq to be in “material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations”.
* Iraq persisted in violating resolutions of the U.N. Security Council by “continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby threatening international peace”.
* Iraq refused to “release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American serviceman”.
* Iraq refused to return “property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait”
* The Iraqi regime used “weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people”.
* Iraq attempted to assassinate a former President of the United States in 1993.
* On “many thousands of occasions” Iraq fired upon “United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council”.

In all, there were 23 reasons cited by the U.S. Congress for going into the war, and NOT ONE OF THEM was OIL. Further, it was CONGRESS and not President Bush that wrote that law, and approved it by an overwhelming majority of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, including politicians from BOTH major parties.

Perri:

Thanks, but we’re all very familiar with the U.S. sanctioned, published casi belli. Foreign Affairs, an excellent (and predominantly right wing) publication, has published a few excellent non-partisan analyses of the “real” causes: check out their website, there may still be some online (they tend to cut them back to abstracts after a few months.) One of the primary ones, not much discussed, was the urgent need to maintain the political primacy and security of Saudi Arabia (ostensibly an American ally) by relocating the approximately 100,000 US troops stationed there: you will recall that was one of the few specific offenses cited by Bin Laden to justify the 9/11 murders.

As for your next point…you know, I’ve yet to read the missing line in the following syllogism:

a) Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator and murderer:
b) Missing Logical connection:

Conclusion: therefore the torture and murder of detainees in American custody is totally cool.

Could you provide that missing link?

Perri,

Let me ask a very simple question, would you permit these methods in your home police interrogation rooms?

If you say “no”, but this is different, then you guilty of “Moral Relativism” which the far-right religous Neo-Clowns always harp about that the Left wing nutters do.

Oh, and Perri, just an FYI, I am a conservative, but I am not a braindead conservative, and if you don’t like my name calling,… there’s the door. Balb may be willing to explain to you why you are wrong, but I grew sick of explain the fucking obvious to the mentally challenged back in 2004. I got sick of explain that there were no WMD’s. I got sick of point out the evidence that support the position that there was no WMD prior to 2003 invasion. I sick of explain that there were link to Iraq and Al Queada prior Bush Optional War of Choice. I go sick of explaining how PNAC and the Office of Special Opperations manipulated the pre war intel. To be honest, I got sick of people who think Fox News if actually Fair and Balanced.

So if Balb want to beat you over the head with a Clue-By-Four, hey, it’s his nickle and he is one of the blog owners. Me I’d rather spend my time debating with people who will actually acknowledge reality.

You can of course continue to flog that long dead horse of George Dubya Bush all you want, but he is retard and complete useless waste of flesh. His Administration regularly ignores internation treaties or finds ways to skirt them and when it comes to USA law he is the same way (ask Ashkoft about the wire taping and Gonzo’s push for the illegal)

Maybe some here would give you the rather long list of the Laws Bush has ignored or decided to reclassify inorder to get around them. Or I have a better Idea, why don’t you go out there and research and learn it yourself.

PS

Sorry Bulb and Stageleft, by I have little use for people like this, even when they are polite about it. These debates have been beaten to death for the last two years and it is like debating whether the world is round or flat today,…

On another note, are you guys going to the Ottawa Blogging get together in August? Balb, would you be up for a dive on the Sunday? Maybe Lock 31? If it is near by.

Zorph

>Yes, in the last few days, we’ve seen a quick shuffle in a number of quarters from: “it was never about oil” to “of COURSE it’s about oil, just not the way YOU meant.” Heh.

The shuffling is by critics trying to revise “it’s all about oil” from meaning “the US is going to take it for themselves” to meaning “for the security of the world’s oil supply”. That’s a change of the war critics’ making after they spent years belaboring the first point. I guess that’s the nice thing about a vague slogan; you can later pretend you meant something else by it.

lrC, I think you’re falling victim of your own straw man. As Zorph said, I don’t recall reading any intelligent war critic suggest that the US was intent on “taking the oil for themselves”.

If anyone is playing the revisionist game, it’s the folks who are now forced to concede that it was, in fact, about the oil .

There were several variations on what the US was supposed to do, Z. Pump it and sell it. Strangle the Euros and Chinese.

>If anyone is playing the revisionist game, it’s the folks who are now forced to concede that it was, in fact, about the oil .

The basic reason for the US military presence in Saudi Arabia and the war in Kuwait which preceded it was never disputed. To now claim that denial of the various flake theories was really denial of the root and implied assumption is to grasp at the thinnest of reeds. You’re behaving rather like the simple-minded people who think a person who is skeptical of anthropogenic global warming rejects the notion of climate change entirely and indulges in asinine sloganeering to that effect. Apparently you’ve all lost your grasp of nuance in the service of what you wish to believe.

To put it simply: turns out we were right.

Dang right, we were right.

“I suppose that means you no longer have any practical or sophisticated analyses to offer.”

No, I’ll stand by the analysis and prediction of outcomes I made four years ago, thanks, which are turning out to be correct.

(Love your revised war aims, by the way. You’re doing a much better reconstruction job than US troops in Iraq.)