Look What You Have Done
Bush was so ready to go to war, seems he didn’t need anyone but god to let him know he was doing the right thing.
A new memo released seems to point out that he was going to do it no matter what. More here.
In the weeks before the United States-led invasion of Iraq, as the United States and Britain pressed for a second United Nations resolution condemning Iraq, President Bush’s public ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was blunt: Disarm or face war.
But behind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair’s top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.
“Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,” David Manning, Mr. Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.
“The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,” Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. “This was when the bombing would begin.”
Now more than 2000 American lives have been lost, many many many more Iraq lives, all for what? Lower cost of oil, shit even oil is above 65 dollars a barrel. Maybe we went for freedom, well now we have civil war. Perhaps we went to stabilize the region, pardon me while I take a few hearty gut laughs then throw up all over the place.
Here is a flash representation of all the “coalition of the willing” soldiers that have been killed. Its pretty heart breaking watching it play.
Oil We Eat
I found this interesting.
Please join me for breakfast. It’s time to fuel up again.
On the table in my small Berkeley apartment this morning is a healthy-looking little meal — a bowl of imported McCann’s Irish oatmeal topped with Cascadian Farms organic frozen raspberries, and a cup of Peet’s Fair Trade Blend coffee. Like most of us, I prepare my breakfast at home, and the ingredients for this one probably cost me about $1.25. (If I went to a cafe in downtown Berkeley, I’d probably have to add $6 more, plus tip, for the same.)
My breakfast fuels me up with about 400 calories, and it satisfies me. So for just over a buck and half and an hour spent reading the morning paper in my own kitchen, I’m energized for the next few hours. But before I put spoon to cereal, what if I consider this bowl of oatmeal porridge (to which I’ve just added a little butter, milk and a shake of salt) from a different perspective. Say, a Saudi Arabian one.
Then what you’d be likely to see — what’s really there, just hidden from our view (not to say our taste buds) — is about 4 ounces of crude oil. Throw in those luscious red raspberries and that cup of java (an additional 3 ounces of crude), and don’t forget those modest additions of butter, milk and salt (1 more ounce), and you’ve got a tiny bit of the Middle East right here in my kitchen.
Now, let’s drill a little deeper into this breakfast. Just where does this tiny gusher of oil actually come from? (We’ll let this oil represent all fossil fuels in my breakfast, including natural gas and coal.)
Nearly 20 percent of this oil went into growing my raspberries on Chilean farms many thousands of miles away, those oats in the fields of County Kildare, Ireland, and that specially raised coffee in Guatemala — think tractors as well as petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides.
The next 40 percent of my breakfast fossil-fuel equation is burned up between the fields and the grocery store in processing, packaging and shipping.
Take that box of McCann’s oatmeal. On it is an inviting image of pure, healthy goodness: a bowl of porridge, topped by two peach slices. Scattered around the bowl are a handful of raw oats, what look to be four acorns and three fresh raspberries. Those raw oats are actually a reminder that the flakes require a few steps ‘twixt field and box. In fact, a visit to McCann’s Web site illustrates each step of cleaning, steaming, hulling, cutting and rolling that turns the raw oats into edible flakes. Those five essential steps require significant energy.
Next, my oat flakes go into a plastic bag (made from oil), which in turn is inserted into an energy-intensive, pressed wood-pulp, printed paper box. Only then does my breakfast leave Ireland and travel 5,000 fuel-gorging, carbon-dioxide-emitting miles by ship and truck to my grocery store in California.
Coming from another hemisphere, my raspberries take an even longer fossil-fueled journey to my neighborhood. Though packaged in a plastic bag labeled Cascadian Farms (which perhaps suggests birthplace in the good old Cascade mountains of northwest Washington), the small print on the back, stamped “A Product of Chile,” tells all — and what it speaks of is a 5,800-mile journey to Northern California.
If you’ve been adding up percentages along the way, perhaps you’ve noticed that a few tablespoons of crude oil in my bowl have not been accounted for. That final 40 percent of the fossil fuel in my breakfast is used up by the simple acts of keeping food fresh and then preparing it. In home kitchens and restaurants, chilling in refrigerators and cooking on stoves using electricity or natural gas gobbles up more energy than you might imagine.
For decades, scientists have calculated how much fossil fuel goes into our food by measuring the amount of energy consumed in growing, packing, shipping, consuming and finally disposing of it. The caloric input of fossil fuel is then compared with the energy available in the edible product, the caloric output.
What they’ve discovered is astonishing. According to researchers at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture, an average of more than 7 calories of fossil fuel is burned up for every calorie of energy we get from our food. This means that in eating my 400-calorie breakfast, I will, in effect, have consumed 2,800 calories of fossil fuel energy. (Some researchers claim the ratio is as high as 10 to 1.)
But this is only an average. My cup of coffee gives me just a few calories of energy, but to process 1 pound of coffee requires more than 8,000 calories of fossil-fuel energy — the equivalent energy found in nearly a quart of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas or about 2 1/2 pounds of coal.
So how do you gauge how much oil went into your food?
First check out how far it traveled. The farther it went, the more oil it required. Next, gauge how much processing went into the food. A fresh apple is not processed, but Kellogg’s Apple Jacks cereal requires enormous amounts of energy to process. The more processed the food, the more oil it requires. Then consider how much packaging is wrapped around your food. Buy fresh vegetables instead of canned, and buy bulk beans, grains, and flour if you want to reduce that packaging.
You may think you’re in the clear because you eat strictly organically grown foods. When it comes to fossil-fuel calculations though, that isn’t relevant. However it is grown, a raspberry is shipped, packed and chilled the same way.
There is some energy savings in growing organically, but it’s probably slight. According to a study by David Pimentel at Cornell University, 30 percent of fossil-fuel expenditure on farms growing conventional (nonorganic) crops is found in chemical fertilizer.
This 30 percent is not consumed on organic farms, but only if the manure used as fertilizer is produced very close to the farm. Manure is a heavy, bulky product.
If farms have to truck bulk manure more than a few miles, the savings is eaten up in diesel-fuel consumption, according to Pimentel.
One source of manure for organic farmers in California is chicken producer Foster Farms. Organic farmers in Monterey County, for example, will truck tons of Foster’s manure from their main plant in Livingston (Merced County) to fields more than 100 miles away.
So the next time we’re at the grocer, do we now have to ask not only where and how a product was grown, but how far its manure was shipped?
Well, if you’re in New York City picking out a California-grown tomato that was fertilized with organic compost made from kelp shipped from Nova Scotia, maybe it’s not such a bad question.
But should we give up on organic? If you’re buying organic raspberries from Chile each week, then yes. The fuel cost is too great, as is the resulting production of the greenhouse gases.
But if there was truth in packaging, where my oatmeal box now tells me how many calories I get from each serving, it would also tell me how many calories of fossil fuels went into the product.
On a scale from one to five — with one being nonprocessed, locally grown products and five being processed, packaged imports — we could quickly average the numbers in our shopping cart to get a sense of the ecological footprint of our diet.
What appeared to be my simple, healthy meal of oatmeal, berries and coffee looks different now. I thought I was essentially driving a Toyota Prius hybrid by having a very fuel-efficient breakfast, but by the end of the week, I’ve eaten the equivalent of more than two quarts of Valvoline.
From the perspective of fossil-fuel consumption, I now look at my breakfast as a waste of precious resources. What I eat for breakfast connects me to the planet, deep into its past with the fossilized remains of plants and animals which are now fuel, and into the future, when these nonrenewable resources will probably be in scant supply.
Maybe these thoughts are too grand to be having over breakfast, but I’m not the only one on the planet eating this morning. My meal traveled thousands of miles to reach my plate.
Then there’s the rise of perhaps 600 million middle-class Indians and Chinese, already demanding the convenience of packaged meals and foreign flavors.
What happens when middle-class families in India or China decide they want their Irish oats for breakfast and topped by organic raspberries from Chile? They’ll dip more and more into the planet’s communal oil well. And someday soon, we’ll all suck it dry.
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A crude menu
A lot of fossil-fuel energy goes into the production of food:– Bowl of oatmeal porridge: 4 ounces of crude oil.
– Serving of red raspberries: 1 ounce of crude oil.
– Butter, milk and salt: 1 ounce of crude oil.
– That cup of java: 2 ounces of crude oil.
– Energy required to produce 1 pound of coffee: a quart of crude oil, 30 cubic feet of natural gas, or about 2 1/2 pounds of coal.
– Energy required to produce one week’s worth of breakfast for one person: More than 2 quarts of crude oil.
Another One Bites The Dust
Andy Card is goners. He resigned today. Maybe he was tired of all the shit he had to deal with on a daily basis. I imagine keeping up with Karl’s latest evil scheme or making sure the president doesn’t do anything really stupid, or keeping Dick Cheney from shooting anyone else can weary a man. Or maybe he humped a school buss full of nuns, and now needs to “spend more time with his family.” Really its anyones guess. So you say to yourself “ohh well now he can bring in some fresh blood, someone new, someone with different ideas, someone to help them out.” You then realize that this is the Bush co. administration we are dealing with now and see that he has picked Josh Bolton another “yes” man. Expect more of the same, and by more of the same I mean its going to get worse and worse and worse….
More here.
White House chief of staff Andy Card has resigned and will be replaced by budget director Josh Bolten, an administration official said Tuesday.
President Bush was expected to announce the shake up during a meeting with reporters with reporters later Tuesday morning in the Oval Office of the White House.
The move comes amid a sharp decline in Bush’s approval ratings and calls from Republicans for the president to bring in new aides with fresh ideas and new energy.
Monday Confessional
Time again for more of my crazy ramblings.
Seems like this weeks is turning out to be a busy one. My fledgling web design business venture is picking up steam, and I have been doing land scape work on the weekends for some extra cash. I have been having lots of fun adventures with Tess, and life is going great. Now if only I can keep it all together long enough to save up some cash. I have to pay my mother a couple hundred bucks a month to pay her back for my car, and hopefully with the heating bill coming down and design work picking up I can send some extra scratch her way. If I get this one job (a very tentative if), I could pay off half of what I owe my mother in one big payment, which would be sweet. Lets hope it all works out. Cape Cod is so damn expensive, I worry about money more than I should.
In other news, I heard on the news today that meteorologists are forecasting that major hurricane could hit New England this year due to weather patterns in the pacific. Sweet. Let me tell you, that sounds like a hoot and a half. We got some very bad storms last year and they were enough for me. But honestly no one is going to really do anything about global warming until Washington DC is hit by a class 5 hurricane, and each and every congress person is terrified into changing some laws.
Tomorrow I might go to a potluck. I have not been to a potluck in ages, not since college. Brings me back to my old goth/hippy days. Peace love and bicycle grease is all we need. That and some hard thrashing industrial music about dark depression.
Our Military Dollars Hard At Work
So after 9/11 we rushed into Afghanistan to kill the Taleban and win one back for the ole USA. I mostly supported this move, as I feel these people were most likely harboring and supporting the people who planned the attacks. It is the Iraq war I am against, but I digress. It seems that a man who converted to Christianity from Islam has been arrested and could face the death penalty…. WHAT THE FUCK!? Was it democracy and freedom we are building in these places or just more shoddy two bit dictators. George Bush should be kicked out of office today, this instant. He has been doing a piss poor job of EVERYTHING.
More Here.
An Afghan who has renounced his Islamic faith for Christianity faces the death penalty under Afghan law in a throwback to the brutal Taleban regime.
Abdul Rahman, 41, is being prosecuted for an “attack on Islam”, for which the punishment under Afghanistan’s draft constitution, is death by hanging.
The charge comes as Britain prepares to send 3,300 nominally Christian paratroopers to stabilise the troubled south of the country.
Mr Rahman converted to Christianity over 14 years ago, but his situation was bought to the attention of the authorities after he tried to gain custody of his daughters who had been living with their grandparents. His parents then denounced him as a convert and on arrest he was found to be carrying a Bible.
“The Attorney General is emphasising he should be hung. It is a crime to convert to Christianity from Islam. He is teasing and insulating his family by converting,” Judge Alhaj Ansarullah Mawlawy Zada, who will be trying his case, told The Times.
“He was a Muslim for 25 years more than he has been a Christian. We will request him to become a Muslim again. In your country two women can marry I think that is very strange. In this country we have the perfect constitution, it is Islamic law and it is illegal to be a Christian and it should be punished,” said the judge.
If Judge Zada, who is head of the Primary Court, passes the death penalty under Afghan law, Mr Rahman still has two avenues of appeal, the Provincial Court and the Supreme Court. The death penalty then has to be ratified by President Hamid Karzai.
Atlantic White Cedar Swamp
I went to a really interesting Atlantic white cedar grove on Cape Cod. Its really interesting and you are expecting Yoda to pop out at any point. The Atlantic white cedar tree will grow and collect a small hillock of material in a swamp and then moss and lichen will grow on that hump. Very beautiful, very strange. Check out these pictures.
In the spring time its all green and hot and full of bugs and tourists, maybe i will go back and take some greener pictures. But its really nice now. I really like that you can walk through what looks like a desert scrub forest and then you walk down a path that looks like a pine oak forest, then you get to Degoba all of a sudden. Travel here you should.
Trip Pictures
Here are some pics of my trip and stuff.
My dads dog Blue.
Wind Turbines In Bowling Green Ohio
Monday Confessional (on Tuesday)
I have officially traded in my shitty ass car. On the way to Ohio I had to fill up my tank 3-4 times for a large cost. On the way back I only filled up once. Started with a full tank got one more. I get about 430 miles per tank which is freaking awesome. I saw wind turbines, visited my old school, and did lots of other fun stuff. Now I am back on cape cod, and having lots of fun hanging out with Tess. She pretends to be crazy. But really is the nicest girl in the whole world. My dads dog Blue, is H. U. G. E. He weighs 165 pounds and is about 4 feet tall. My dad also has a new raccoon that is super cute and much nicer than his old raccoon. Ella is nice and fun and will play with you, Bubba (the old one) was mean and just wanted to express his love for you as horrible horrible pain. It was a great trip, but I am happy to be home.
Foot In Mouth
So these people all said jackass things, and now a bunch of people are dead. More here.
Weeks after the invasion of Iraq began, Fox News Channel host Brit Hume delivered a scathing speech critiquing the media’s supposedly pessimistic assessment of the Iraq War.
“The majority of the American media who were in a position to comment upon the progress of the war in the early going, and even after that, got it wrong,” Hume complained in the April 2003 speech (Richmond Times Dispatch, 4/25/04). “They didn’t get it just a little wrong. They got it completely wrong.”
Hume was perhaps correct–but almost entirely in the opposite sense. Days or weeks into the war, commentators and reporters made premature declarations of victory, offered predictions about lasting political effects and called on the critics of the war to apologize. Three years later, the Iraq War grinds on at the cost of at least tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Around the same time as Hume’s speech, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas declared (4/16/03): “All of the printed and voiced prophecies should be saved in an archive. When these false prophets again appear, they can be reminded of the error of their previous ways and at least be offered an opportunity to recant and repent. Otherwise, they will return to us in another situation where their expertise will be acknowledged, or taken for granted, but their credibility will be lacking.”
Gathered here are some of the most notable media comments from the early days of the Iraq War.
Declaring Victory
“Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?”
(Los Angeles Times headline, 4/10/03)“Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America’s unrivaled power and how best to use it.”
(CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)“Congress returns to Washington this week to a world very different from the one members left two weeks ago. The war in Iraq is essentially over and domestic issues are regaining attention.”
(NPR’s Bob Edwards, 4/28/03)“Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics’ complaints.”
(Fox News Channel’s Tony Snow, 4/27/03)“The only people who think this wasn’t a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington.”
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)“We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back.”
(Newsweek’s Howard Fineman–MSNBC, 5/7/03)“We’re all neo-cons now.”
(MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)“The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war.”
(Fox News Channel’s Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)“Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we’d seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking.”
(Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation [stunt]–Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)Mission Accomplished?
“The war winds down, politics heats up…. Picture perfect. Part Spider-Man, part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan. The president seizes the moment on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.”
(PBS’s Gwen Ifill, 5/2/03, on George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech)“We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical, who’s not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who’s president. Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It’s simple. We’re not like the Brits.”
(MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, 5/1/03)“He looked like an alternatively commander in chief, rock star, movie star, and one of the guys.”
(CNN’s Lou Dobbs, on Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech, 5/1/03)Neutralizing the Opposition
“Why don’t the damn Democrats give the president his day? He won today. He did well today.”
(MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)“What’s he going to talk about a year from now, the fact that the war went too well and it’s over? I mean, don’t these things sort of lose their–Isn’t there a fresh date on some of these debate points?”
(MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, speaking about Howard Dean–4/9/03)“If image is everything, how can the Democratic presidential hopefuls compete with a president fresh from a war victory?”
(CNN’s Judy Woodruff, 5/5/03)“It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the broadest context….. And the silence, I think, is that it’s clear that nobody can do anything about it. There isn’t anybody who can stop him. The Democrats can’t oppose–cannot oppose him politically.”
(Washington Post reporter Jeff Birnbaum– Fox News Channel, 5/2/03)Nagging the “Naysayers”
“Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?”
(Fox News Channel’s Alan Colmes, 4/25/03)“I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)“I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types…. I just wonder, who’s going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: ‘Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong’? Maybe the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war….
“Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein? Well, Mr. Ritter actually told a French radio network that — quote, “The United States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between its legs, defeated.” Sorry, Scott. I think you’ve been chasing the wrong tail, again.
“Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don’t call them ‘elitists’ for nothing.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 4/10/03)“Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years.”
(Fox News Channel’s Dick Morris, 4/9/03)“This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush. The toppling of Mr. Hussein, or at least a statue of him, has made their arguments even harder to defend. Liberal writers for ideologically driven magazines like The Nation and for less overtly political ones like The New Yorker did not predict a defeat, but the terrible consequences many warned of have not happened. Now liberal commentators must address the victory at hand and confront an ascendant conservative juggernaut that asserts United States might can set the world right.”
(New York Times reporter David Carr, 4/16/03)“Well, the hot story of the week is victory…. The Tommy Franks-Don Rumsfeld battle plan, war plan, worked brilliantly, a three-week war with mercifully few American deaths or Iraqi civilian deaths…. There is a lot of work yet to do, but all the naysayers have been humiliated so far…. The final word on this is, hooray.”
(Fox News Channel’s Morton Kondracke, 4/12/03)“Shouldn’t the [Canadian] prime minister and all of us who thought the war was hasty and dangerous and wrongheaded admit that we were wrong? I mean, with the pictures of those Iraqis dancing in the streets, hauling down statues of Saddam Hussein and gushing their thanks to the Americans, isn’t it clear that President Bush and Britain’s Tony Blair were right all along? If we believe it’s a good thing that Hussein’s regime has been dismantled, aren’t we hypocritical not to acknowledge Bush’s superior judgment?… Why can’t those of us who thought the war was a bad idea (or, at any rate, a premature one) let it go now and just join in celebrating the victory wrought by our magnificent military forces?”
(Washington Post’s William Raspberry, 4/14/03)“Some journalists, in my judgment, just can’t stand success, especially a few liberal columnists and newspapers and a few Arab reporters.”
(CNN’s Lou Dobbs, 4/14/03)“Sean Penn is at it again. The Hollywood star takes out a full-page ad out in the New York Times bashing George Bush. Apparently he still hasn’t figured out we won the war.”
(MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, 5/30/03)Cakewalk?
“This will be no war — there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention…. The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling…. It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on.”
(Christopher Hitchens, in a 1/28/03 debate– cited in the Observer, 3/30/03)“I will bet you the best dinner in the gaslight district of San Diego that military action will not last more than a week. Are you willing to take that wager?”
(Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, 1/29/03)“It won’t take weeks. You know that, professor. Our military machine will crush Iraq in a matter of days and there’s no question that it will.”
(Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, 2/10/03)“There’s no way. There’s absolutely no way. They may bomb for a matter of weeks, try to soften them up as they did in Afghanistan. But once the United States and Britain unleash, it’s maybe hours. They’re going to fold like that.”
(Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, 2/10/03)“He [Saddam Hussein] actually thought that he could stop us and win the debate worldwide. But he didn’t–he didn’t bargain on a two- or three week war. I actually thought it would be less than two weeks.”
(NBC reporter Fred Francis, Chris Matthews Show, 4/13/03)Weapons of Mass Destruction
NPR’s Mara Liasson: Where there was a debate about whether or not Iraq had these weapons of mass destruction and whether we can find it…
Brit Hume: No, there wasn’t. Nobody seriously argued that he didn’t have them beforehand. Nobody.
(Fox News Channel, April 6, 2003)“Speaking to the U.N. Security Council last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell made so strong a case that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is in material breach of U.N. resolutions that only the duped, the dumb and the desperate could ignore it.”
(Cal Thomas, syndicated column, 2/12/03)“Saddam could decide to take Baghdad with him. One Arab intelligence officer interviewed by Newsweek spoke of “the green mushroom” over Baghdad–the modern-day caliph bidding a grotesque bio-chem farewell to the land of the living alongside thousands of his subjects as well as his enemies. Saddam wants to be remembered. He has the means and the demonic imagination. It is up to U.S. armed forces to stop him before he can achieve notoriety for all time.”
(Newsweek, 3/17/03)“Chris, more than anything else, real vindication for the administration. One, credible evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Two, you know what? There were a lot of terrorists here, really bad guys. I saw them.”
(MSNBC reporter Bob Arnot, 4/9/03)“Even in the flush of triumph, doubts will be raised. Where are the supplies of germs and poison gas and plans for nukes to justify pre-emption? (Freed scientists will lead us to caches no inspectors could find.) What about remaining danger from Baathist torturers and war criminals forming pockets of resistance and plotting vengeance? (Their death wish is our command.)”
(New York Times’ William Safire, 4/10/03)
Huge Oil Spill In Alaska
So when they tell you that we should drill in ANWR because its “safe” they are telling you a load of lies. Seems no one notices as a quarter million gallons of oil just sort of leaked out of a pipe on the north slope of Alaska last week. Oops.
An oil spill discovered at Prudhoe Bay field is the largest ever on Alaska’s North Slope region, American officials say.
They estimate that up to 267,000 gallons (one million liters) of crude leaked from a corroded transit pipeline at the state’s northern tip.
The spill was detected on March 2 and plugged. Local environmentalists have described it as “a catastrophe.”
In 1989, the Exxon Valdez shipping disaster spilled 11m gallons (42m liters) of oil onto the Alaskan coast.
“I can confirm it’s the largest spill of crude oil on the North Slope that we have record of,” Linda Giguere, from Alaska’s state department of environmental conservation, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press.
The estimate is based on a survey conducted several days ago at the site where the leak was discovered, officials say.
Thats a lot of oil to just leak out of a pipe. Is no one paying any attention at all.
Cletus: “hey billy this here dial says we is about a quarter million gallons short on this here pipe, think we should do anythin bout this?”
Billy: “umm nope, American gladiator is on.”
I mean seriously what the hell.
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