Just damn.
It's true, but just damn.
Double-barrelled Mega-PING! to both lists! If you want on, FReepmail me!
Posted on 05/15/2004 6:14:20 PM PDT by Living Stone
I could,possibly,agree on Graner being chosen specifically,because of his civilian record...maybe.
But this junk did more harm than good.Maybe it has made those trying to get us out of Iraq think twice, but it has cost us more than it has helped.Unless it gets women out of combat zones and stops the promotion of women,just because they are women.But I doubt that that was part of any psychological ops..IF that was even part of what happened.
You would think that anyone elected President of the United States would have a better grasp of the mindset and probable behavior of his counterparts in the Middle East than a 22-year-old kid from Missouri fresh out of a New England college, whose only exposure to the Arab world was visiting four Arab countries on a college Glee Club concert tour.
This is entirely correct!
However...that President should have been Bill Clinton.
And Carter.Neither Clinton nor Carter understood anything about foreign policy and they still don't!
.
Check out the current Issue of the National ENQUIRER that quotes "Military Sources" as saying that a 4 months pregant Specialist ENGLISH doesn't really know who the father of her baby is. That after ENGLAND had SeX with her boy friend up in the Barracks she would come down and have SeX with Iraqi prisoners.
So the Father of Specialist ENGLISH's Baby could be an Iraqi Terrorist..!
Specilaist ENGLISH is stating on American TV that she did everyhing in Iraq on the orders of her superiors.
I don't think so.
.
As usual, you bring up some very good points.
Seems that there is probably a lot of good that came from this, but the bad certainly out weighed it - at least on the home front.
On another note (and the reason I pinged everyone) is some info that just came into my knowledge which is very interesting:
I know a man personally who just came back from one of his trips to Iraq.
He is Iraqi himself, but he's been here in the States for 25 years.
He is working for a company who is third party contracted to Halliburton to rebuild a 320 mile long pipeline in Iraq.
They go over for 15 day stints at $1000. a day.
They have two Humvees in the front and two in the back for protection while they work.
This 320 mile long pipeline they are working on is 42" with a 1/2" wall thickness, and, presumbably it was an oil transport line.
This gives you an idea of the amount of oil which was intended to be transported through this line.
Sadaam filled this line with gasoline to be used by his tanks and vehicles in the field.
Now figuring if this line was even half full, that amounts to 61 million gallons of fuel.
When our troops pushed through the line was abandoned, and the Iraqi people have cut holes in the line to get to the gasoline.
The line now has over 200 holes of various sizes cut into it, and these holes are spread over the length of the line.
My Iraqi acquaintance figures it will take six months to find all the holes and repair the line so that it can transport oil.
I suspect this is a microcosm of the problems which exist in Iraq.
If we pull out at the end of next month, these problems will never be solved, and our departure will create a political vacuum which will degenerate into civil war with some despot, maybe worse than Sadaam, taking control of the whole country.
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, terrorists love it.
Or, the whole thing was a fabrication from the beginning and the "reserve troops" were all set in place. This would explain a multitude of issues that freepers brought up with the original photos posted here. The apparent willingness of the men in the pics to pose was a surprise to me.
All of this fits perfectly into the idea in the post.
This idea should be re-written, perhaps as a vanity or something, and posted on the regular forum. It is just too, too fun to speculate about this.
Much of this war on terror is being carried out at a level beneath the radar screen of the media, the public, the international community, and the enemy.
It was Winston Churchill who said, and I am paraphrasing, "in war, the truth is so important that it must be protected with a bodyguard of lies".
I do not know what went on there, in Abu Ghraid, and although I have speculated a bit about it, I do not need to know, as long as the desired effect is achieved.
If the end result of the release of these photographs is a more hesitant enemy, and a reduction in troop casualties, then it is all for the better , I say.
War can be an ugly thing.
I myself would hesitate as far as re-writing someone else's article. If you think it deserves wider coverage, you can link to it, or just ping folks to it.
It is a little harder to find for most in this not-quite-so-smoky-backroom, but I did not put it here, and will not argue with those who did.
You, of course, are free to do as you like.
Just damn.
It's true, but just damn.
Double-barrelled Mega-PING! to both lists! If you want on, FReepmail me!
bizarre
ping.
bttt
PING!
caveat: some coarse/vulgar language
interesting take on the issue.
ping
Refusal to understand a different culture sometimes works to our advantage, when it's our enemies who don't understand the way we think. Friends in the Intelligence community in the very early '80s told me that when Carter cancelled the B-1 bomber program in June of 1977, the Russians were absolutely terrified, to the point of paralysis. They knew that the only reason to cancel such a program was to spend the money on a much more effective weapons system.Er, no. Carter just thought we didn't need a replacement for the B-52, even though some of those airframes were older than their pilots. Ronald Reagan was of a bit different mindset, and he rehabilitated the B-1 program after being elected in 1980. The Iranian fundamentalists, who had bedeviled Carter for over a year, released the hostages about five minutes before Ronald Reagan took office in January of 1981. Arabs respond to power. They believed they could not outmaneuver Reagan.
The problem here is not what happened at Abu Ghraib, I don't really care. I know this is war and I don't believe the propaganda spewed by the leftist media. I always think before parroting their hateful manipulations to bring down the president. The problem here is that those photos were made available to the press, something that should've never happened. You don't give ammunition to the enemy and expect to survive.
That part I believe. She was the lowest rank. Her boyfriend was a "superior". And most likely the ringleader.
No problem.
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