Replies to post #1490 on Nothing But Politics

[sylvester80]

Too bad that your own Bush administration contradicts you. They just announced only 20 minutes ago that.... THEY HAVE YET TO FIND ANY WMDs!!! NONE! ZILTCH! NADA!

You are just quoting the idiots of Fox news that every chemical find and every UN sealed container immediately means to them WMDs. IT DOES NOT. So far they've cried wolf more than 16 times and all 16 times the stuff were NOT WMDs. Wake up!

http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=916236

24 DAYS AND STILL NO WMDS!!!!! NONE! ZILTCH! NADA! The reality is coming closer and closer that Bush has committed the worse crimes of all. He's killed scores and scores of innocent people ON A LIE!!!!

[sylvester80]

NEWS:Weapons teams, with no international legitimacy, scour Iraq

Secret units in desperate hunt for banned arsenal

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,935304,00.html

Nicholas Watt, Owen Bowcott and Richard Norton-Taylor
Saturday April 12, 2003
The Guardian

Britain and the United States have bypassed the United Nations to establish a secret team of inspectors to resume the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
It is a sign of the desperation in London and Washington to find a "smoking gun" to justify the war that the Anglo-American team has already conducted three inspections in the past two weeks.

No banned weapons have so far been found.

The decision to set up a new group of inspectors, dubbed US-movic because they are an American-led rival to Unmovic, will infuriate the UN.

Kofi Annan, the secretary general, pointedly reminded Britain and the US this week that Unmovic still has a mandate to carry out inspections.

Last night the chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, added his criticism by saying that war against Iraq was a foregone conclusion months before the first shot was fired.

In a scathing attack on Britain and the US, Mr Blix accused them of planning the war "well in advance" and of "fabricating" evidence against Iraq to justify their campaign.

Mr Blix told the Spanish daily El Pais: "There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their attitude to the [weapons] inspections."

He said Iraq was paying "a very high price _ in terms of human lives and the destruction of a country" when the threat of banned weapons could have been contained by UN inspections.

The role played by the new inspectors, who set up a base in Kuwait a week before the war began, was disclosed to the Guardian by David Kay, the former head of Unscom, the arms inspections team which left Iraq in 1998 after Iraq accused it of being infiltrated by spies.

No mention has been made of the new group by ministers or military spokesmen, who have indicated that weapons inspections are carried out by military forces. But the group, headed by Charles Duelfer, a former deputy head of the Unscom weapons inspectors, has travelled extensively in Iraq.

It is understood that Mr Duelfer's team was called in to inspect weapons and papers found at an airbase in Iraq's western desert two weeks ago. In the past week it has made two separate visits to sites on the road between Kuwait and Baghdad.

US and British special forces are also engaged in fierce exchanges in largely unnoticed fighting in Qaim, a strategic town on the border with Syria.

British defence officials were unusually coy last night about the fighting, which involved units of Iraq's Special Republican Guard, according to senior US military sources.

One explanation is that Iraqi forces are trying to protect either material which could be used for chemical or biological weapons or evidence of Iraq's attempts to develop a nuclear bomb. Another is that they are defending senior members of the regime trying to escape to Syria.

The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction after three weeks of war has raised questions about the casus belli. But British intelligence officials said it might be months before evidence was uncovered.

A cabinet minister has told the Guardian that Saddam Hussein's failure to use chemical weapons was not an indication of their absence. They had been dismantled and their contents hidden around the country.

"The regime has not had time to reassemble the things," a British official said.

"You will not find a factory of gleaming missiles," a source said. "They would have been broken down ages ago."

Mr Kay described the new inspectors as a "robust group of people". "There are special forces teams that carry out [immediate] inspections. But they are not as technically based as the Kuwait team, who are heavily science-based civilians."

A spokesman for Mr Blix, Ewen Buchanan, said the US-led team had tried and failed to recruit some of his staff.

Paul Rogers, professor of peace studies at Bradford University, said the existence of the secret team would lead to a major dispute. "You are more likely to find what you want if you do it yourself," he said. "If this team finds a smoking gun, people will not believe it."

The disclosure is likely to embarrass British ministers, who are officially committed to allowing Unmovic a role.

Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, would only say yesterday that Britain and the US had set up a "machinery" for resuming inspections. "It may take some time," he added.

The US-Kurdish advance in the north meanwhile brought the front to within 60 miles of Tikrit, where some of Saddam's backers were believed to be taking refuge. Coalition aircraft have been striking Republican Guard positions in the area, and roadblocks have been erected to prevent Iraqi leaders from reaching the city to stage a last stand.

[sylvester80]

NEWS: U.S. desperate to find WMD but so far NOTHING!

http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=916841

[sylvester80]

NEWS:Blix: US was bent on war

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,935251,00.html

Nicholas Watt
Saturday April 12, 2003
The Guardian

War against Iraq was a foregone conclusion months before the first shot was fired, the chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has claimed.
In a scathing attack on Britain and the US, Mr Blix accused them of planning the war "well in advance" and of "fabricating" evidence against Iraq to justify their campaign.

Letting rip after months of frustration, he told the Spanish daily El Pais: "There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their attitude to the [weapons] inspections."

Mr Blix said Iraq was paying a "a very high price in terms of human lives and the destruction of a country" when the threat of banned weapons could have been contained by UN inspections.

The 74-year Swedish diplomat made clear that he believes he was misled by President Bush. At a White House meeting last October Mr Bush backed the work of Unmovic, the UN inspection team.

But at the time Mr Blix knew "there were people within the Bush administration who were sceptical and who were working on engineering regime change". By the start of March the hawks in Washington and London were growing impatient.

He said he believed that finding weapons of mass destruction had been relegated as an aim and the main objective had become the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

[sylvester80]

The hell that once was a hospital

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,935298,00.html

Suzanne Goldenberg in Baghdad
Saturday April 12, 2003
The Guardian

The man had been dumped near the rubbish bins at the back, blood spreading across his chequered shirt. An orderly, who had been burying bloated corpses in a mass grave in the hospital grounds, recited the Muslim last rites. "Dead, dead, he's died, what can we do?" and returned to his shovel. But the man was breathing, in slow laborious gurgles, and his flesh was warm.
Forty-eight hours after Baghdad was liberated - as President George Bush would call it - by American forces, the city yesterday was in the throes of chaos. Men with Kalashnikovs dragged drivers from their cars at gunpoint, babies were killed by cluster bombs, and hospitals that had carried on right through the bombing were transformed into visions of hell.

Floors were coated with stale blood, and wards stank of gangrene. The wounded lay on soiled sheets in hospital lobbies, screaming with pain, or begging for tranquillizers. Orderlies in blue surgical gowns shouldered Kalashnikovs to guard against marauders. Ambulance drivers staged counter-raids on looters to reclaim captured medicines and surgical supplies.

Amid such scenes of anarchy, it was not always clear who was responsible: US soldiers, unnerved by a spate of suicide bombings, who continued yesterday to open fire on civilian cars; the pockets of resistance by the die-hard supporters of the regime; the scores of armed Iraqis rampaging through Baghdad; or the unexploded ordnance strewn about the city. But Iraqis had a ready culprit: they blame America for toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein before it was prepared to deliver order to Baghdad.

At Yarmouk hospital, once the city's main casualty centre, the unclaimed corpses were so badly rotted that volunteers wearing chemical warfare masks buried them in mass graves. Sixteen stinking corpses were heaved into the ground yesterday and 20 on Thursday, after collection from the local mosques.

Some were Arab recruits to Saddam's cause, from Syria and Lebanon, with no one to mourn them in Iraq. Some belonged to families stranded in those pockets of Baghdad which remained outside the control of the US troops even yesterday. Others were so badly charred and bloodied, the doctors gave up hope of ever knowing who they were.

"I am searching for my brother. He's dead since four days ago," said Thair Mohe el-Din, green eyes tired beyond exhaustion as he returned from the morgue of the Saddam children's hospital.

On Monday the family home in the Beyaa neighbourhood of west Baghdad was bombed by American aircraft, wounding one of Mr Din's brothers, and killing another outright. He had visited seven hospitals and countless mosques searching for him.

At each makeshift mortuary he had encountered dozens of corpses. None was his brother, and as he continued to search, edging his car warily through the columns of smoke from plundered buildings and the armed mobs who have taken over the streets, grief was making way for a powerful hatred.

"It's my country, and I hate Saddam," he said. "But why are they allowing robbing, why are they allowing people to set fire to buildings? Saddam was right to put those kinds of people in prison.

"I don't like Saddam, I hate him; but when I see American soldiers I want to spit on them."

At Yarmouk hospital there was no time for anger yesterday - only the sad, sickening work of burying the dead. Rifle fire crackled, and the volunteer burial committees stolidly dug on. Then came the boom from an American tank shell, and the hospital guards - neighbours drafted into service with their Kalashnikovs - fled into the grounds. A young man, naked to the waist, ran in screaming, waving his bloodied hands in the air. A sedan with two flat tyres pulled up, with an entire wounded family, and the corpse of a baby girl. Her name was Rawand, and she was nine months old.

When her family returned to their home for the first time since the war yesterday, she crawled over to a small dark oval - a cluster bomblet - which detonated, killing her outright, and injuring her mother, and two of her boy cousins.

Only one doctor was on duty at Yarmouk yesterday - it shut down at the beginning of the week - and he left the grave diggers and went to try to save the family. Rawand's father, Mohammed Suleiman, was inconsolable. "I am going to kill America - not today, after 10 years," he swore.

Battle at hospital


By the rubbish bins, the unknown man was barely breathing. His eyes were closed, and he could not speak. After what seemed like an eternity, the doctor was brought, and he ran an intravenous drip into his arm from a trolley of supplies abandoned in the yard.

The hospital ceased to function on Monday when it became a main battle theatre between US forces and Iraqi fighters. But there was no time to tell the wounded streaming in from other parts of Baghdad.

"Many cars came from here and there. They didn't know there was a battle. When they came, the American forces shot them," said Mohammed al-Hashimi, a doctor at Yarmouk. A Volvo was hit directly opposite the hospital, a Volkswagen a few yards away, and an ambulance further down the road.

"There were injured people in those cars, and we wanted to treat them. We were in our coats," Dr Hashimi said, tugging at his white doctor's collar. "We took a gurney to transfer the injured patients. They saw them, and they still shot them."

He interrupted his story to beg a car to take Mr Suleiman's relatives to the nearest hospital - a paediatric centre. There was little the staff there could do.

"We are working with no anaesthetic at all," said Iman Tariq al-Jabburi. "The doctors are exhausted. There is no water to wash our hands from patient to patient. But what we really need is security."

She summoned an ambulance to move the family - and the unknown man - to yet another hospital, Saddam medical centre, once the finest facility in a city known for the quality of its medical care, and now the only hospital with a functioning operating theatre.

Another doctor stepped out of the crowded ward, grabbing a cigarette from a passing ambulance driver.

"Where is freedom in Iraq?" he said. "Where?"

[sylvester80]

Children killed as marines fire on vehicle

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,935307,00.html

Saturday April 12, 2003
The Guardian

US marines said they killed two children at a checkpoint in Iraq yesterday when the driver of the vehicle in which the youngsters were travelling ignored warnings to stop, creating fears of a suicide attack.
Captain Jay Delarosa, spokesman for the 15th US Marine Expeditionary Unit in Nassiriya, said nine other people in the vehicle were wounded in the incident.

"Our marines took action to protect themselves against what they thought was a suicide attack," he said, claiming the driver ignored repeated warnings to stop.

"We are providing the best available medical assistance to those injured," he added. No weapons had been found in the vehicle. "It was a regrettable mistake."

American forces manning checkpoints across Iraq are on edge following suicide attacks that have killed or wounded soldiers checking vehicles.

Capt Delarosa said a vehicle that he described as a minivan had approached a checkpoint in Nassiriya at high speed. "The vehicle was told numerous times to stop, not only by the signs but by motions by the marines," he said.

"The vehicle picked up speed and moved through the protecting obstacles in front of the checkpoint. The marines suspected, because of the actions, that it was a suicide bomber. The marines opened fire. Our command regrets this incident."

On March 29, four soldiers were killed in a suspected suicide attack near Najaf. On April 4, three US special forces soldiers and two Iraqis were killed when a car bomb exploded at a checkpoint in central Iraq.

On Thursday night, five servicemen were injured in a suicide attack at a checkpoint in Baghdad.

On April 1, American soldiers shot dead seven women and children when their car failed to stop at a checkpoint near Najaf. Three days later, seven Iraqis, including three children, died when marines opened fire on two vehicles south of Baghdad.