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Iraq war images
The sick cost of war
Islamic extremists demonstrate and show hatred - terrorism at work
Children of terrorism
Abu Ghraib prisoner torture image gallery
the following quotes are compiled from various places on the internet regarding the Iraq war and the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that seem to have magically just disappeared.
“What’s the difference?”
~ George W. Bush, 2003-12-16 in an interview with Diane Sawyer, excusing his lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, by claiming that there was no difference between having weapons and wanting to have them.
“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
~ George W. Bush, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2002-10-07, on evidence for Iraq’s non-existent nukes.
“The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.”
~ George W. Bush, 2003-03-17
“Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.”
~ George W. Bush, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2002-10-07. These tubes turned out to be nothing more threatening than the tubing used to construct playground equipment.
“We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States.”
~ George W. Bush, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2002-10-07, on Iraq’s non-existent drones capable of launching an attack on the USA.
“We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.”
~ George W. Bush, 2005-05-23, Interview of the President by TVP, Poland. If he found them, what happened to them?
“Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.”
~ George W. Bush, Speech to UN General Assembly, 2002-09-12
“Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.”
~ George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2003-01-28
“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
~ George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2003-01-28. The documents supporting this turned were crudely forged.
“The United Nations concluded in 1999 that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons sufficient to produce over 25,000 liters of anthrax — enough doses to kill several million people. He hasn’t accounted for that material. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed it.”
~ George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2003-01-28 This was a bit of dissembling, using out-of-date information to imply Saddam was still armed even though inspectors found no traces. What would constitute evidence something was destroyed other than by allowing inspectors to see for themselves it no longer exists, which Saddam did.
“The United Nations concluded that Saddam Hussein had materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin — enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure. He hadn’t accounted for that material. He’s given no evidence that he has destroyed it.”
~ George W. Bush, State of the Union Address, 2003-01-28 This was a bit of dissembling, using out-of-date information to imply Saddam was still armed even though inspectors found no traces.
“We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons — the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.”
~ George W. Bush, Radio address, 2003-02-08
“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”
~ George W. Bush, Address to the nation, 2003-03-17
“While we were here in this Council chamber debating Resolution 1441 last fall, we know, we know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq. Most of the launchers and warheads had been hidden in large groves of palm trees and were to be moved every one to four weeks to escape detection.”
~ Colin Powell, 2003-02-05
“We know he has been absolutely trying to acquire nuclear weapons and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons,”
~ Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, 2003-03-16
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”
~ Dick Cheney, Speech to VFW convention, 2002-08-26
“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”
~ Paul Wolfowitz, Vanity Fair Interview, 2003-05-28
“Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes.”
~ Ari Fleisher, Press Briefing, 2003-03-21
“But make no mistake — as I said earlier — we have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about and it is about. And we have high confidence it will be found.”
~ Ari Fleisher, Press Briefing, 2003-04-10
“If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world.”
~ Ari Fleisher, Press Briefing, 2002-12-02
“Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes.”
~ Ari Fleisher, Press Briefing, 2003-03-22
“There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. And . . . as this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them.”
~ General Tommy Franks, Press Conference, 2003-03-22
“I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.”
~ Ken Adelman, Defense Policy Board member, Washington Post, 2003-03-23
“One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD. There are a number of sites.”
~ Patricia Clark, Pentagon Spokeswoman, Press Briefing, 2003-03-22
“We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
~ Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, Washington Post, op-ed, 2003-04-09
“The war could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
~ Donald Rumsfeld, 2003-02-07, apparently not.
How You Know Bush Lied About WMDs in Iraq
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
~ Mark Twain“How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis.”
George W. Bush, 2005-12-14.“I don’t have a clue and I don’t plan to undertake any real effort to find out.”
~ General Colin Powell, when asked about the number of deaths the Iraqi military suffered.
and the final quote
“Torture is wrong, even when Americans do it.”
~ God, 2007-10-01
According to the Washington Post as of 2006-10-10 a team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in 2005-12. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.
The Iraqi ministry of Health estimates 150,000 civilians killed as of 2006-11-09.
According to The Harring Report as of 2006-08-15, 158,000 U.S. military were shipped to Iraq, 5,500 deserted, 12,000 were killed and 25,000 seriously wounded according to DoD unpublished lists. The official total is 2,791 killed.
As of 2005-12-07, U.S. military dead in Iraq, including suicides, 2,125; U.S. military amputeed, wounded, injured, mentally ill, all now out of Iraq, 49,500; Iraqi civilians dead, 118,900.
~ McLaughlin Group
on 2005-12-12 Bush admitted 30,000 Iraqis have been killed. He made the comment at a world Affair Council Q & A session.
Here is a ball park estimate based on the Viet Nam war. 444,000 North Vietnamese and 220,557 South Vietnamese military personnel and 587,000 civilians were killed. The Vietnam war cost $623 billion in today’s dollars.
In the Vietnam war, the cost per civilian killed was thus $1 million. If that same spending efficiency had been achieved in Iraq, there would be 300,000 dead civilians by the time $300 billion had been spent. It is pushing 1 trillion now.
Consider that killing people in Iraq is far easier than in Viet Nam. In Viet Nam there was impenetrable jungle cover, a huge network of tunnels, and the enemy spread out over a very wide area thinly populated. Further in Iraq much less care was taken to avoid killing civilians. There was less ground action and more aerial bombing of cities.
Republicans claim that Americans killed only a few thousand or so Iraqis. This is thus an obvious lie. Those fibbers are trying to make you believe Uncle Sam spent 100 million dollars to kill each Iraqi civilian. That is preposterous. Arafat recruited suicide bombers for only $15 thousand each.
| Posted by (justsick) in (Iraq war) on November-25-2007 | Read More |
From Rolling Stone, the article is called the Great Iraq Swindle. Not a new article, but worth a read… The Great Iraq Swindle
How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins — he knows all about being a successful contractor in Iraq.
You start off as a well-connected bureaucrat: in this case, as an Air Force civil engineer, a post from which Robbins was responsible for overseeing 70,000 servicemen and contractors, with an annual budget of $8 billion. You serve with distinction for thirty-four years, becoming such a military all-star that the Air Force frequently sends you to the Hill to testify before Congress — until one day in the summer of 2003, when you retire to take a job as an executive for Parsons, a private construction company looking to do work in Iraq.
Now you can finally move out of your dull government housing on Bolling Air Force Base and get your wife that dream home you’ve been promising her all these years. The place on Park Street in Dunn Loring, Virginia, looks pretty good — four bedrooms, fireplace, garage, 2,900 square feet, a nice starter home in a high-end neighborhood full of spooks, think-tankers and ex-apparatchiks moved on to the nest-egg phase of their faceless careers. On October 20th, 2003, you close the deal for $775,000 and start living that private-sector good life.
A few months later, in March 2004, your company magically wins a contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to design and build the Baghdad Police College, a facility that’s supposed to house and train at least 4,000 police recruits. But two years and $72 million later, you deliver not a functioning police academy but one of the great engineering clusterfucks of all time, a practically useless pile of rubble so badly constructed that its walls and ceilings are literally caked in shit and piss, a result of subpar plumbing in the upper floors.
You’ve done such a terrible job, in fact, that when auditors from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction visit the college in the summer of 2006, their report sounds like something out of one of the Saw movies: “We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate,” they write, adding that “the urine was so pervasive that it had permanently stained the ceiling tiles” and that “during our visit, a substance dripped from the ceiling onto an assessment team member’s shirt.” The final report helpfully includes a photo of a sloppy brown splotch on the outstretched arm of the unlucky auditor.
When Congress gets wind of the fiasco, a few members on the House Oversight Committee demand a hearing. To placate them, your company decides to send you to the Hill — after all, you’re a former Air Force major general who used to oversee this kind of contracting operation for the government. So you take your twenty-minute ride in from the suburbs, sit down before the learned gentlemen of the committee and promptly get asked by an irritatingly eager Maryland congressman named Chris Van Hollen how you managed to spend $72 million on a pile of shit.
You blink. Fuck if you know. “I have some conjecture, but that’s all it would be” is your deadpan answer.
The room twitters in amazement. It’s hard not to applaud the balls of a man who walks into Congress short $72 million in taxpayer money and offers to guess where it all might have gone.
Next thing you know, the congressman is asking you about your company’s compensation. Touchy subject — you’ve got a “cost-plus” contract, which means you’re guaranteed a base-line profit of three percent of your total costs on the deal. The more you spend, the more you make — and you certainly spent a hell of a lot. But before this milk-faced congressman can even think about suggesting that you give these millions back, you’ve got to cut him off. “So you won’t voluntarily look at this,” Van Hollen is mumbling, “and say, given what has happened in this project . . . ”
“No, sir, I will not,” you snap.
“. . . ‘We will return the profits.’ . . .”
“No, sir, I will not,” you repeat.
Your testimony over, you wait out the rest of the hearing, go home, take a bath in one of your four bathrooms, jump into bed with the little woman. . . . A year later, Iraq is still in flames, and your president’s administration is safely focused on reclaiming $485 million in aid money from a bunch of toothless black survivors of Hurricane Katrina. But the house you bought for $775K is now assessed at $929,974, and you’re sure as hell not giving it back to anyone.
“Yeah, I don’t know what I expected him to say,” Van Hollen says now about the way Robbins responded to being asked to give the money back. “It just shows the contempt they have for us, for the taxpayer, for everything.”
Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity — to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.
And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over — not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure — American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.
It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it lasted.
Find the rest of the story here
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