Had you read OBL's manifesto, you would also know that Shrub sold us out by fulfilling the boogie-man's chief demand----that the U.S. close its airbase in Saudi Arabia. We quietly closed that sucker down in the dead of night with nary a peep from the so-called "liberal media." Your man doesn't negotiate with terrorists, though, isn't that right?

__________________


"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

You must have lost your job on K Street. My condolences.

I hear Jesus can cure your blindness, though.

__________________


"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

I will be happy to take a look at Mr. Baker's earlier thoughts
on Iraq. I clicked your link, and then archives. I am not sure
where to go from there. How about a clue?




Pardon me, but pre-war the inspectors were getting no cooperation
from Saddam, and they said so. That was one of the main reasons I
supported the war. Why would he act as though he was hiding something
if he in fact had nothing to hide?




Gotta primary source?




Great Ceasar's ghost, I hope you do not carry on like this
in front of your students.

__________________
From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord, deliver us.

Well, whaddya know, it looks like Mr. Baker pulled many of the think-tank's policy reports off the site. I had to think about some of the titles of the reports I've read in the past & do a Google search. Luckily, it looks some astute soul archived some of this stuff. Here's a start for you.

STRATEGIC ENERGY POLICY CHALLENGES

Hopefully, this article will put it in perspective for you, because it is a lot of reading. And this is but one such article that begins to make the argument for deposing Saddam & laying claim to the oil. Here's a piece written by Larry Everest, a reporter from (gasp!) San Francisco (and note that he does not editorialize; he simply posts facts):

"The case Cheney vs. U.S. District Court is scheduled to be heard before the Supreme Court next month and could end up revealing more about the Bush administration's motives for the 2003 Iraq war than any conceivable investigation of U.S. intelligence concerning Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction.

The plaintiffs, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch, the conservative legal group based in Washington, argue that Vice President Cheney and his staff violated the open-government Federal Advisory Committee Act by meeting behind closed doors with energy industry executives, analysts and lobbyists.

The plaintiffs allege these discussions occurred during the formulation of the Bush administration's May 2001 "National Energy Policy."

For close to three years, Cheney and the administration have resisted demands that they reveal with whom they met and what they discussed.

Last year, a lower court ruled against Cheney and instructed him to turn over documents providing these details.

On Dec. 15, the Supreme Court announced it would hear Cheney's appeal. Three weeks later, Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spent a weekend together duck hunting at a private resort in southern Louisiana, giving rise to calls for Scalia to recuse himself. So far, he has refused.

Why has the administration gone to such lengths to avoid disclosing how it developed its new energy policy?

Significant evidence points to the possibility that much more could be revealed than mere corporate cronyism: The national energy policy proceedings could open a window onto the Bush administration's decision-making process and motives for going to war on Iraq.

In July 2003, after two years of legal action through the Freedom of Information Act (and after the end of the war), Judicial Watch was finally able to obtain some documents from the Cheney-led National Energy Policy Development Group.

They included maps of Middle East and Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, two charts detailing various Iraqi oil and gas projects, and a March 2001 list of "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," detailing the status of their efforts. The documents are available at Judicial Watch.

These documents are significant because during the 1990s, U.S. policy- makers were alarmed about oil deals potentially worth billions of dollars being signed between the Iraqi government and foreign competitors of the United States including France's Total and Russia's LukOil.

The New York Times reported the LukOil contracts alone could amount to more than 70 billion barrels of oil, more than half of Iraq's reserves. One oil executive said the volume of these deals was huge -- a "colossal amount."

As early as April 17, 1995, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. petroleum giants realized that "Iraq is the biggie" in terms of future oil production, that the U.S. oil companies were "worried about being left out" of Iraq's oil dealings due to the antagonism between Washington and Baghdad, and that they feared that "the companies that win the rights to develop Iraqi fields could be on the road to becoming the most powerful multinationals of the next century."

U.N. sanctions against Iraq, maintained at the insistence of the United States and Britain, prevented these deals from being consummated.

Saddam Hussein's removal in 2003 has left the deals in a state of limbo, but the Bush administration's insistence that only countries supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom are eligible for postwar reconstruction does not bode well for French and Russian concerns.

An April 2001 report by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations and the Baker Institute for Public Policy -- commissioned by Cheney to help shape the new energy policy -- also devoted serious attention to Iraq.

The report, "Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century," complained about Hussein's oil leverage:

"Tight markets have increased U.S. and global vulnerability to disruption and provided adversaries undue potential influence over the price of oil. Iraq has become a key 'swing' producer, posing a difficult situation for the U.S. government. ... Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to ... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East.

"Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export programme to manipulate oil markets."

Significantly, the report concluded that the United States should immediately review its Iraq policy, including its military options.

There are many other indications that, despite the Bush administration's repeated and insistent denials, petroleum politics may have played a crucial role in the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

For instance, both the State Department and the Pentagon had pre-war planning groups that included a focus on Iraq's oil industry; protecting the industry was an early U.S. objective in the war.

In October 2002, Oil and Gas International reported that U.S. planning was already under way to reorganize Iraq's oil and business relationships.

In January 2003, the Wall Street Journal reported that representatives from Exxon Mobil Corp., ChevronTexaco Corp., ConocoPhillips and Halliburton, among others, were meeting with Vice President Cheney's staff to plan the post- war revival of Iraq's oil industry.

Cheney is said to have once remarked that the country that controls Middle East oil can exercise a "stranglehold" over the global economy.

One-time Bush speech writer David Frum wrote in "The Right Man," his 2003 biography of his boss, that the United States' "war on terror" was designed to "bring new freedom and new stability to the most vicious and violent quadrant of the Earth -- and new prosperity to us all, by securing the world's largest pool of oil."

Further records from Cheney's Energy Task Force could shed more light on the inner workings of the Bush administration's march to war in Iraq. The first question, though, is whether the Supreme Court will lift the Bush-Cheney veil of secrecy."

I'll grant you, it takes time to begin to see the true motives. It will require a lot more than reading this one document. But as an American citizen, you owe it to yourself to know what is being done in your name. You're free to dismiss this out of hand & not delve any deeper if it appears it may begin to cause you to reconsider your stance, but I'm always optimistic that some Americans remain skeptical about people in power & will continue to look below the surface for the true meaning of what is being wrought in our collective names. I can only lead you to the water----I can't make you drink.

__________________


"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

Oh, they said so, did they? How 'bout you provide me the sources for that? This is one of those lies Shrub & others spread about so often that, in some quarters, it has become fact ("See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.")

The Duelfer Report made clear that this wasn't true, as did many preceding reports & numerous U.N. inspectors have made statements in a similar vein. Saddam did in fact desire WMDs, but not because he wanted to strike the U.S. He wanted them to enhance his image in the Middle East and to deter Iran. But, he didn't have them, mostly because Don Rumsfeld couldn't sell them to him anymore.

http://www.wright.edu/~mark.willis/g...n_rumsfeld.jpg

__________________


"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

I just provided you a plethora of primary source material, & you surely have the ingenuity to find plenty more on your own should you be so moved.

__________________


"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

Students? What students? I'm not a teacher. I'm a writer & a documentarian (in addition to other things). You can view my next film in the spring of 2008, likely on a PBS station near you. It will be chock-full of primary source material, & nothing but. So much so that you might just choke on it.

__________________


"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

Juvenalia.

__________________
From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord, deliver us.

It is clear from your comments that you have not read
the article yourself, or have forgoten everything you read.
I skipped to the "Recommendations" section, and skimmed
that. It was completely innocuous. It even recomended
(ca. 2001) dropping sanctions against Iraq!

(from the link, emphasis added)
As I said, I skimmed part of the article. Since you are the one
who says it contains sinister revelations, why don't you extract
them yourself, and post them here when you have a chance.




You are right- the idea that a reporter from San Francisco
might present an unbiased acount of anything makes me gag.

Do let us know what happens down the road with this case,
though, and I agree Scalia might be presonally close enough
to the VP to consider recusal.




You led me to water all right, but you now are the one with
a wet face, not me.

Try again.

__________________
From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord, deliver us.

Sure:

CNN.com - Blix: Iraq can't account for deadly gas, germs - Jan. 27, 2003

(from the link):
To be fair, I will include this further statement from the link:
Still, we have anthrax, thousands of chemical rockets,
and missing nuclear weapons program documents missing.
Plus key scientific personnel not allowed to meet with UN
inpectors without the beady eyes of a Saddam goon taking
it all in.




"Shrub?- never heard of him.




You have no way of knowing (without a primary source)
what Saddam's intentions might have been had he gotten
his hands on a WMD stockpile.

__________________
From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord, deliver us.

The only primary source you claim to have given was
the report by Baker's organization, and I do not think
that really qualifies as a primary source.

What I meant was diaries, personal notes and the like
confirming that the administration's private statements
contradict its public ones.

__________________
From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord, deliver us.

I thought you said you had taught at one time.
I would be happy to be wrong. You are the last
person we need in any classroom.

PBS has done some fine work in the past. I regret
learning their standards are not what they used to be.

__________________
From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord, deliver us.

Do actions, photos, & images count? I'll give but one example. "The U.S. does not engage in torture."

__________________


"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson

I certainly hope that you yourself are not a teacher. Your defense of this administration's actions make you a dangerous, sinister human. I hate the idea that you might inculcate our nation's youth with the notion that engaging in the foreign policy of this current administration is the preferred methodology.

__________________


"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither breaks my leg, nor picks my pocket."

Thomas Jefferson