Saddam's chambers of horrors

[Valin]

Toronto Globe & Mail:

Margaret Wente

Nov. 23 2002

 

Abu Ghraib, 30 kilometres west of Baghdad, is Iraq's biggest prison. Until recently, it held perhaps 50,000 people, perhaps more. No one knows for sure. No one knows how many people were taken there through the years and never came out.

 

For a generation, Abu Ghraib was the centrepiece of Saddam Hussein's reign of torture and death. Yahya al-Jaiyashy is one of the survivors.

 

(Snip)

 

Saddam's Iraq is a rebuke to anyone who may doubt that absolute evil dwells among us. No one has put it better than Mr. Sweeney, the BBC reporter. "When I hear the word Iraq, I hear a tortured child screaming."

 

 

 

http://youtu.be/JojVRTbauIU

Playlist

PLEASE NOTE: Viewer discretion is advised!! This program presents disturbing images of graphic violence and executions under the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

 

Too those both Left and Right who say it was a mistake to invade and overthrow Saddam Hussein, I have Two Words for you.

 

In particular I'm talking about Steve Chapman Now I'm not saying he is a slimy little amoral punk...but he does a very good impersonation of what one sounds like.

[Valin]

53% of Americans are Ignorant Idiots

[Valin]

We paid a heavy price in Iraq ... but think what would have happened if we’d backed away

Decade after start of conflict, former PM writes for The Sun

Tony Blair

3/18/13

 

UNDERSTAND why, after long, hard and often brutal campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, people say: It’s a mistake – we should never have been there.

 

They look at the carnage in Syria and say: Nothing to do with us.

 

They see what is happening in Mali and across North Africa and say: Let someone else sort it out.

 

But I do not believe we can or should stand aside from the global struggle against this extremism and, although we pay a heavy price for intervention, we should not think staying out is cost free.

 

I fear the long-term cost if we take that path may be much greater.

 

(Snip)

 

 

 

Read the comments for some very enlightened deep analysis

[Valin]

Tom Cotton’s truths about Iraq

Scott Johnson

3/18/13

 

Arkansas Fourth District Rep. Tom Cotton appeared on CNN’s State of the Nation yesterday along with his colleague Hawaii Second District Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (video below). Our friend Rep. Cotton set forth a few significant truths about the American effort in Iraq that should not be obscured by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and his media colleagues.

 

 

In the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, Naval War College professor of national security affairs Stephen Knott also sought to remind readers of a few truths that nicely complement Rep. Cotton’s. Professor Knott’s column is behind the Journal’s subscription pay wall. Here it is:

 

(Snip)

 

According to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Hugh Shelton, in 1997 a key member of President Bill Clinton’s cabinet (thought by most observers to have been Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) asked Gen. Shelton whether he could arrange for a U.S. aircraft to fly slowly and low enough that it would be shot down, thereby paving the way for an American effort to topple Saddam. Kenneth Pollack, a member of Mr. Clinton’s National Security Council staff, would later write in 2002 that it was a question of “not whether but when” the U.S. would invade Iraq. He wrote that the threat presented by Saddam was “no less pressing than those we faced in 1941.”

 

Radicalized by the events of 9/11, George W. Bush gradually concluded that a regime that had used chemical weapons against its own people and poison gas against Iran, invaded Iran and Kuwait, harbored some of the world’s most notorious terrorists, made lucrative payments to the families of suicide bombers, fired on American aircraft almost daily, and defied years of U.N. resolutions regarding weapons of mass destruction was a problem. The former chief U.N. weapons inspector, an Australian named Richard Butler, testified in July 2002 that “it is essential to recognize that the claim made by Saddam’s representatives, that Iraq has no WMD, is false.”

 

(Snip)

[Draggingtree]

53% of Americans are Ignorant Idiots

Hmmmmmm what happen to the 47%

[Valin]

53% of Americans are Ignorant Idiots

Hmmmmmm what happen to the 47%

 

You mean the smart ones?

[Valin]