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stcynic | November 1, 2004I was out of the loop a bit from Friday to Sunday, but while eating lunch on Friday afternoon, I did see the press conference held at the Pentagon that claimed that they had blown up the HMX and RDX. By my count this was their 5th different excuse as to what happened and, of course, it contradicts all the previous ones. It's a claim that cannot be disproven, and therein lies the beauty of it. But given that it comes after a series of lies and false alibis, the only ones who are likely to believe it's true are those who desperately want it to be true. Sorry, but it stretches credulity to the…
stcynic | October 31, 2004I have returned. Much better debate at this tournament than the last one, but that was expected. EGR is a major national tournament, with teams coming from far and wide, New Hampshire to California, and that includes probably half of the top ten teams in the nation. The tournament is actually still going on, it should be in the final round right now. I had fun, got to see several more old friends who were quite surprised to see me at a debate tournament for the first time in so long. This will probably be the last one I judge, though I am going to try to arrange a get together during another…
stcynic | October 29, 2004I have a couple hours before I have to get hit the road, so let me throw out one last summation on the missing explosives. The videotape provided by the Minneapolist TV station, taken on April 18th, has now been conclusively shown to contain footage of the very explosives that are now missing. David Kay, first head of the Iraq Survey Group, was on CNN last night and said the following:
Well, at least with regard to this one bunker, and the film shows one seal, one bunker, one group of soldiers going through, and there were others there that were sealed. With this one, I think it is game, set…
stcynic | October 28, 2004I will be gone all weekend, until Sunday afternoon. I'm going to judge another debate tournament. This one is a major national tournament with teams from a dozen states coming, so the debate should be considerably better at this one. So no more posting on the explosives story, which looks to be pretty much case closed anyway. Have a great weekend everyone.
stcynic | October 28, 2004The Bush defenders would have a much better case to make about media bias being the point of this controversy if it weren't for all that pesky evidence that keeps showing up. The latest? Turns out that those barrells that the news crew videotaped in the still-sealed bunkers on April 18th are, in fact, full of HMX:
Experts who have studied the images say the barrels on the tape contain the high explosive HMX, and the U.N. markings on the barrels are clear.
"I talked to a former inspector who's a colleague of mine, and he confirmed that, indeed, these pictures look just like what he remembers…
stcynic | October 28, 2004Take a look at this article by Peter Galbraith, a former ambassador who reported to Paul Wolfowitz. He reports on more post-war looting and how dangerous it was to our troops:
IN 2003 I went to tell Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz what I had seen in Baghdad in the days following Saddam Hussein's overthrow. For nearly an hour, I described the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion -- the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad, the devastation of Iraq's cultural heritage, the anger of ordinary Iraqis who couldn't understand why the world's only superpower was…
stcynic | October 28, 2004Yesterday, President Bush addressed the growing controversy over the missing explosives at a campaign stop and he predictably pulled out the ultimate appeal to uber-patriot morons, the claim that if you attack the administration's policies, you attack the troops themselves. And the audience, naturally, booed on cue. How dare those people say our troops screwed up! Well of course, no one is saying that the troops screwed up, we're saying that the war planners themselves screwed up, especially Rumsfeld, who refused to give the generals the troops they needed to do the job right. For crying out…
stcynic | October 28, 2004And while I'm arguing with Sandefur on the explosives story, I still think you should go to his blog and read his post on substantive due process and the post from Jon Rowe to which it responds. You can learn a hell of a lot about constitutional law by following their exchanges on that subject and this is no exception.
stcynic | October 28, 2004Here we go again....
What a surprise, it turns out that Ed Brayton et al. may have jumped the gun on the missing-explosives story. Astonishing!
The link here is to a story in the Washington Times that claims that the Russian government sent transportation units into Iraq to help them move the WMD to other nations immediately before the war began, and speculates that they may also have moved the 380 tons of missing explosives from Al Qaqaa as well. But even a cursory reading of the article shows that it does not, in fact, undermine my position at all. First, there is no evidence offered in…
stcynic | October 28, 2004The administration's faithful defenders at Fox News are trying mightily to make the case that the explosives were gone before troops arrived, but they're doing so with misleading headlines. Look at this article on their website headlined "Search Showed No Explosives at Iraqi Base Before War's End". But the article itself says nothing of the kind. Here's the first paragraph of the article, which is supposed to sum up what the article actually says:
U.S. forces searched several times last year the Iraqi military base from which 380 tons of explosives vanished -- including one check a week…
stcynic | October 28, 2004Bill Ware, a longtime reader and sometime commenter here, has started his own blog. He doesn't post as often as I do, but what he does post is really substantive and worth reading. Go forth and contemplate.
stcynic | October 27, 2004Jason Kuznicki has jumped into the Sandefur/Brayton tete-a-tete with this post, at least in a manner of speaking. I agree with his assessment of Bush, obviously, but I still can't bring myself to vote for Kerry.
stcynic | October 27, 2004From the AFP: "It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," said Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the science ministry's site monitoring department and previously worked with UN weapons inspectors under Saddam.
"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall and I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."
This same official also notes that the entire area around the Al Qaqaa site…
stcynic | October 27, 2004The first defense story, which White House aides started frantically emailing reporters, was that NBC News had been with our troops when they first got there and confirmed that they were already gone. That was quickly shown to be false by the NBC reporter who was there, who said that in fact there was no search done. And it turned out that this reporter was with the second group of troops through there, not the first, which was a week before. The first group was the 3rd Infantry, and the Colonel from that group admits that they did not do a thorough search either because they didn't even know…
stcynic | October 27, 2004Sandefur writes:
Yes, I know Brayton claims not to be a Kerry supporter, but so did Andrew Sullivan.
There is a real difference between the two. Sullivan was a Bush supporter who slowly swung over to being a Kerry supporter (rather reluctantly), and for many of the same reasons I've criticized the administration. He was a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq, but has been appalled by how incompetently it's been handled by the administration. I, on the other hand, was never a Bush supporter, and I've made clear several times that I am voting Libertarian this year, as I have in every election…
stcynic | October 27, 2004Ding, ding:
Look, I don't know what happened to these explosives, and I'm pretty sure Ed Brayton doesn't either. But my point was not about what happened to them. My point was about whether it is fair to declare this as an example of alleged incompetence in the White House. Once again, without having the evidence at hand, with at least plausible alternative explanations for these missing weapons, Brayton leaps onto the Kerry explanation like a starving man on a steak--without pausing even to ask whether it is technically feasible for anyone to have kept track of this particular site.
Well,…
stcynic | October 26, 2004Sandefur says I "fell" for a false story about the disappeared explosives:
Explosives disappear in April of 2003 or so, before American troops arrive. The probable explanation is that Iraqi troops moved the material out of the bunker and camouflaged it prior to American bombing, and that it was either destroyed, or stolen then. Nevertheless, the press runs out in the last week before the election and runs this as if it is a new story--careful not to mention any dates--to make it sound as though this is some revelation of massive incompetence in American leadership, rather than the usual…
stcynic | October 26, 2004In an interview with Good Morning America taped Sunday, President Bush said:
"I don't think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do so."
Now let's compare that to the Federal Marriage Amendment that he has been promoting:Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.
As I pointed…
stcynic | October 26, 2004Last night, the people in my fantasy football league had a little get together because one of our group, a reservist, is leaving for an 18 month tour of duty in Iraq in a couple of days. His unit will be stationed around Fallujah, one of the most dangerous areas of the country. He is leaving behind a wife and two sons, 8 and 11, and he knows that he may not be back to see them, so it's a tough situation. We all signed our names and best wishes on two yellow ribbons, one that will go around a tree at the local watering hole that we always meet at, and one that will go around a tree at their…
stcynic | October 25, 2004The new FBI Uniform Crime Report is out and it shows that 755,000 people were arrested last year on Marijuana charges, with 9 out of 10 of them being arrested solely for possession (over the past decade, the total is 6.5 million arrests). And here's a stat that no one ever talks about. The United States rate of imprisonment is four times higher than any other civilized nation. The next closest is England, but the US still locks up four times as many citizens per capita as they do. Think there's a connection between those two things? I do. The costs of pursuing the failed "war on drugs" costs…