Posted on 09/04/2002 6:58:10 PM PDT by kattracks
WASHINGTON, Sept 4 (Reuters) - Pressing his case against an assault on Baghdad, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said on Wednesday the United States had no legitimate reason to attack Iraq and that it would be a grave mistake to do so.
"The claim that Iraq is a threat is a complete fraud. I don't think they believe it for a minute," Clark said, referring to the Bush administration's stated grounds for seeking to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Clark, who served in the Johnson administration at the height of the Vietnam war, said it would be "the gravest mistake" of any president in his lifetime if President George W. Bush launches a war against Iraq.
The U.S. government has accused Iraq of amassing weapons of mass destruction, a charge Baghdad denies.
"What business is it of the United States to engage in regime change?," Clark asked at a news conference called to announce anti-war demonstrations expected to take place on Oct. 26 in Washington, San Francisco, London, Paris, Berlin and Rome.
Bush said on Wednesday that at the appropriate time he would ask Congress to approve any action on Iraq "necessary to deal with the threat."
Clark has been a vocal opponent of U.S. policy on Iraq and the U.N. sanctions imposed on Baghdad for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In Baghdad last week, he urged the United Nations to act to prevent a U.S. assault on Iraq, saying it would breed more violence.
Other American critics of a possible war against Iraq shared their opinions on Wednesday at a Capitol Hill forum chaired by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat.
Some participants warned that a U.S. strike without legitimate reason, could destabilize the Middle East.
"A U.S. invasion would likely be met with fury across the region" American University professor Edmund Ghareeb said.
"Most Arab states view Iraq as a country on its knees, a victim of trigger-happy U.S. policies. An invasion would only serve to galvanize anti-American feelings, and help fulfill the dreams of extremists," Ghareeb said.
© Reuters Limited.
Correct, but with a caveat. Here is what the Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (the lead agency in the technical aspects of nuclear proliferation and test ban enforcement) has to say about even very close range detection of nuclear weapons:
"Another difficulty is that several types of weapon designs can make it almost impossible, using radiation measurements, to confirm that a declared item is a weapon." (source)Of course there is always the argument that when discussing militarily sensitive technology that what they admit to today may well be a generation or two behind our real capabilities. But the task of satellite based radiation detection of nuclear warheads is daunting, to say the least, and may well be beyond man's capabilities to ever do.
Regards,
Boot Hill
You've got to be kidding me.
I was about eight years old when Clark was AG. For the longest time afterward I thought his name was "Ramsey F***ing Clark" because that's what I heard my dad call him. And that was before Clark became a communist, my dad was just reacting to the man's sheer and visible incompetence.
and only began to bash him because of his stance on Iraq.
Again, you've gotta be kidding me. My memory goes back a long way. His opinion NOW is not worth any more than it was when he defended the Achille Lauro hijackers.
You mean those NEST teams that carried around their detectors disguised as a carton of Marlboro cigarettes? LOL! That worked great until the nicotine nazis made it so unpopular that they stood out like klansmen at a Bar Mitzvah.
Regards,
Boot Hill
palmer: I would imagine you would like to defend or explain your statements, I will wait until you do before I respond to the apparent disionformation you posted
It was the honorable thing to do.
Regards,
Boot Hill
And if we DID have RADEC that could detect nuclear weapons from space, the environmentalists would take a break from starting forest fires to complain that our satellites are bad for the environment...
With all due respect, Iraq is not Vietnam, there are no jungles and opposition morale is not exactly high.
One of the major differences between now and then is that Johnson KNEW the war was unwinable (as he was constrained to fight it), from the very beginning, before the escalation. He said so and its recorded in the tapes that were recently released.
Johnson was an insecure pile of pond scum who forever wanted to be liked by the Kennedy crowd, and therefore had us pay a heavy price in morale,human life and the rest of it, in order to prove his manliness to them, since Kennedy started the whole thing rolling. Nobody's going to repeat that idiot's mistakes (exactly).
My critical error was not realizing how few high energy photons are produced by the nuclear material, only a few photons per second per gram of material. Those photons are scattered in all directions so the signal will decrease with the sqaure of the distance. So detection not only requires close proximity, but it takes time (5 or 10 minutes) to gather enough photons to make a measurement.
Here's a paper with a practical example: gamma ray measurements of a soviet cruise missile warhead. The bottom line: the detector has to be within at most 20 meters of the warhead.
Kudos
Isn't that what I said? :)
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