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Thread: My tables — meet it is I set it down

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    My tables — meet it is I set it down

    I don't remember whether I said it here. But I said it elsewhere, and I said it then: in 2002/3, no-one can have reasonably believed that there were ballistic missiles in Iraq capabale of being deployed in 45 minutes. I've said it since. Given what had happened in that region since the original invasion of Kuwait 10 years before, it was simply not credible. (Interesing factoid: allegedly more air missions were flown over Iraq between the two Gulf wars than were flown over Europe in WW2. They were, of course, almost entirely reconnaissance.)

    The Guardian reports (...the Mail reporting that...) Adam Holloway, a 'defence specialist', gives further detail about the story that the information came from a taxi driver. Seems that MI6 were 'running' a senior Iraqi army officer --

    Pausing there. Did you get that? A senior Iraqi officer was an MI6 agent. This sort of revelation is like that which came out a few years ago, to the effect that Admiral Canaris, head of Nazi intelligence from 1935 to 1944, was in regular contact with British Intelligence. Previously we have heard all about the lack of 'humint', and the necessity to rely on 'elint'. Seems that was a big fib - though an understandable one. Anyway, back to the thread...

    officer, who himself was running a taxi driver who operated near the border with Syria. He claimed to have overheard army officers talking about missiles in the back of his cab.

    Holloway goes on to say this:

    "In the [MI6] analysts' footnote to their report, it flagged up that part of the report describing some missiles that the Iraqi government allegedly possessed was demonstrably untrue. The missiles verifiably did not exist.

    "The footnote said it in black and white. Despite this the report was treated as reliable and went on to become one of the central planks of the dodgy dossier."
    (My emphasis.)

    True, or not? But it does suggest that British Intelligence was doing rather better than we had previously been informed, and that the reason we were fed a bunch of horseshit decorated, wrapped and tied up with a ribbon labelled as 'crucial information', was all about politics rather than Intelligence work. (See the thread title.)

    There are no missiles, dear Minister dear Minister. Repeat there are no missiles. What exactly should you tell Parliament and the country?
    Last edited by Barry Shnikov; 8th-December-2009 at 12:13 PM.

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Army intelligence, now there's an oxymoron if ever I saw one. We should never have went into Iraq or Afghanistan. We only went in to wipe the ars*s of the damn yanks anyway, pull out of both sh1t holes and let the yanks kill themselves instead of our boys. I should be in the diplomatic core me, I could then diplomaticaly tell the yanks to go and screw themselves and stop involving us in their world domination plans.

    Hope this completly unbiased view helps.

    DTS XXX XXX

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by dave the scaffolder View Post
    Army intelligence, now there's an oxymoron if ever I saw one.
    I've always thought "precision bombing" was more unintentionally ironic.

    Quote Originally Posted by dave the scaffolder View Post
    We should never have went into Iraq or Afghanistan.
    It's curious how easily people are now conflating the two conflicts. I find the distinction much easier - perhaps because New Zealand was involved in Afghanistan and refused to get involved in Iraq.

    Personally, I think the Afghanistan war was far more justified: the Taliban were willingly providing a safe haven for a known terrorist. The problem arose because the US (ie Bush, Cheney et al) decided to create an excuse to invade Iraq instead (see Barry's Original Post). If they'd dedicated the resources they used in Iraq to stabalising Afghanistan, they'd most likely be out of there now.

    Unfortunately, they did invade. To turn around and say, "we've had enough, sort out your own problem" is morally reprehensible when the problem is one of their own creation. Afghanistan has been an unfortunate crossroads of major world powers for a long, long time now. While no-one has ever been able to conquer it, someone's attacked them every time they've started to evolve as a civilisation, breaking down all the institutions that we take for granted.

    But walking away and saying, "it's too hard" is a pretty inhumane decision. It would be like telling your friend you're going to help them remodel their kitchen. You go in, without their permission, and pull out the old appliances. And the back wall. Then remember that want to help someone else with their living room. So you mess around for a few more weeks and finally realise that winter's arrived, and you've got a slight cold because you are working in their open remains of a kitchen. So you leave them to die of pneumonia.

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by Barry Shnikov View Post
    I don't remember whether I said it here. But I said it elsewhere, and I said it then: in 2002/3, no-one can have reasonably believed that there were ballistic missiles in Iraq capabale of being deployed in 45 minutes. I've said it since.
    I seem to recall that we were reasonably in doubt either way- no-one knew what to believe. In hindsight it does look like consummate propaganda but I took the view that I was not in possession of the full facts, in common with ooh, maybe 99.999999% of the British people, and had to assume that there were people around with more information than me that maybe I should listen to. Pathetically sheeplike, I know, but there it is. Baa.

    Glad to hear you knew better than the rest of us, though.

    BTW, much of your post, starting with the brilliantly enigmatic title, appears to be in code - have you switched jobs?

    How's your knee these days?

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by geoff332 View Post
    I've always thought "precision bombing" was more unintentionally ironic.
    only if you think "a town" isn't precise enough.

    But walking away and saying, "it's too hard" is a pretty inhumane decision. It would be like telling your friend you're going to help them remodel their kitchen. You go in, without their permission, and pull out the old appliances. And the back wall. Then remember that want to help someone else with their living room. So you mess around for a few more weeks and finally realise that winter's arrived, and you've got a slight cold because you are working in their open remains of a kitchen. So you leave them to die of pneumonia.
    To have an anology on interior design that ends in death by pneumonia - I've got to say...that's brilliant

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by Barry Shnikov View Post
    I don't remember whether I said it here. But I said it elsewhere, and I said it then: in 2002/3, no-one can have reasonably believed that there were ballistic missiles in Iraq capabale of being deployed in 45 minutes.
    According to an article on the Dailymail today, the '45 minute' intelligence was the product of a conversation an Iraqi taxi driver overheard taking place between his passengers. As a reliable source of information it sounds fair enough to me.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...came-taxi.html

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by jivecat View Post
    Glad to hear you knew better than the rest of us, though.
    Well, we can dispute about 'what is knowledge'?

    I took the view that since 1991 Iraq had been the most intensely surveilled country since history began - a 'no fly' zone, subject to continuous Wild Weasel missions, permanently in view of one or more US satellites, UN inspections, sealed borders etc - and that if there had been the faintest whiff of development of biological or chemical weapons, the F-18s would have been like a midge swarm over the area.

    Iraqi missiles had been a particular cause for concern in GW1 - remember the Bravo Two Zero stories? - and UK and US special forces were all over the place monitoring their movements and directing fire or sabotaging them. Saddam threw some at Israel to try to start a new Arab-Israeli conflict. (IIRC Saddam had to agree to decommission whatever he had left..? But I could be wrong about that.) But you don't think both the US and Israel were doing every ounce of eavesdropping and spying that they could manage to ensure he didn't suddenly announcee "Hey! Guess what? I have nerve gas and it's on its way to Tel Aviv! Ha ha haaa!"

    Ships in and out of the ports were subject to inspection by US naval vessels, attempts to acquire nuclear material or toxin precursors would have been difficult to keep under wraps, but the most important thing is that the US elint teams would have been analysing truck movements across the country, movements of Iraqi scientists, rail, infrastructure, the whole thing, and their computers would have been spitting out anything that sniffed remotely like hidden laboratories or hidden manufacturing plants, and there would have been either a big diplomatic row or more likely a Tomahawk cruise missile would have appeared over the horizon. (Jesus, Clinton authorised the bombing of a plant in Sudan - and he was a (more or less) peacable President and Sudan wasn't an enemy country.)

    So, adding all that together, I concluded that there were no WMDs, let alone anything capable of being deployed in 15 minutes. I knew just the same way I knew that the WTC was destroyed by terrorists in planes, and not by US government operatives trying to outrage the home population.
    BTW, much of your post, starting with the brilliantly enigmatic title
    Thanks. I was quite proud of that
    appears to be in code - have you switched jobs?
    Code? Muchly kine whomever sarasota.
    How's your knee these days?
    Better in general, ta; but today and yesterday just a smidge swollen.

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by jivecat View Post
    In hindsight it does look like consummate propaganda but I took the view that I was not in possession of the full facts, in common with ooh, maybe 99.999999% of the British people, and had to assume that there were people around with more information than me that maybe I should listen to.
    ...
    Glad to hear you knew better than the rest of us, though.
    The premise that it is OK to invade someone on the suspicion they may be able to commit a crime is a fairly dubious foundation for an argument. that, if nothing else, set of alarm bells. It certainly flys in the face of the foundation of all western jurisprudence. To put it another way: if you're going to kill someone, you need to be completely sure. There's no way that they were completely sure.

    At the time - in 1991, prior to the invasion or Iraq, I certainly did make exactly this argument. While I didn't (and still don't) know all the facts, I could see that a case was being manufactured. I watched them shift from, "Iraq was responsible for 9/11" to "Iraq has WMD" to "this is a humanitarian war". If you have a sound argument with clear evidence, you can be sure that it wouldn't shift around like that.

    In the 1950s, a couple of theorists of decision making described a garbage can theory of decision making. That is, when a decision is being made, people tend to throw all sorts of issues at the decision, in the hope they will get tied to it and addressed through the decision made. In most cases, the decision is pre-decided. At the time, this looked like the case for Iraq: George wanted to go and finish daddy's war (and make a lot of money for all the people that bought him the Whitehouse - I'd love to know just how much money Haliburton has made out of Iraq). He tried to use 9/11 as an excuse. When this wasn't working, he added WMD to the list. Then he added regime change to the list. All of this would have been a lot more convincing if senior members of his administration hadn't explicitly stated they wanted to invade Iraq prior to 9/11. A problem in search of a decision indeed.

    The other important point to remember is most countries around the world supported the invasion of Afghanistan, in principle, if not militarily. The countries supporting Iraq were far fewer. Again, this tells us that the US hadn't made their case at diplomatic levels. I would immediately want to know why that case hadn't been made. If there were good answers, then I could still accept it. But, in this case, I couldn't find any good reasons.
    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    only if you think "a town" isn't precise enough.
    As a rule, no. Particularly not if I live in that town.
    Quote Originally Posted by Dreadful Scathe View Post
    To have an anology on interior design that ends in death by pneumonia - I've got to say...that's brilliant
    Perhaps the ridiculousness of the analogy was intended to be the broader and more insightful analogy...
    Quote Originally Posted by Bubble View Post
    According to an article on the Dailymail...
    Am I the only one who stops reading at anything that starts with "According to the Daily Mail..."?
    Last edited by geoff332; 8th-December-2009 at 03:07 PM. Reason: added some stuff

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by geoff332 View Post
    The premise that it is OK to invade someone on the suspicion they may be able to commit a crime is a fairly dubious foundation for an argument. that, if nothing else, set of alarm bells. It certainly flys in the face of the foundation of all western jurisprudence. To put it another way: if you're going to kill someone, you need to be completely sure. There's no way that they were completely sure.
    I suppose I worked backwards from this premise and thought - they must be completely sure to be taking drastic steps which will result in the deaths of other people, far away, but they are not letting us know the full reasons that are making them completely sure. I'm not normally too trusting, but I certainly fell for that one.

    I also think that there are going to be times when for military reasons you would not wait around to be completely sure as this would give the advantage to the enemy. That's not right but it's practical.

    Quote Originally Posted by B. Shnikov
    So, adding all that together, I concluded that there were no WMDs, let alone anything capable of being deployed in 15 minutes. I knew just the same way I knew that the WTC was destroyed by terrorists in planes, and not by US government operatives trying to outrage the home population.
    The latter was a possibility but as you had been paying attention you could conclude that the former was not a probability.

    Should've listened to you, not Tony, then.

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by Bubble View Post
    According to an article on the Dailymail today, the '45 minute' intelligence was the product of a conversation an Iraqi taxi driver overheard taking place between his passengers. As a reliable source of information it sounds fair enough to me.
    Yeah, probably as reliable as the Daily Mail...

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by jivecat View Post
    Should've listened to you, not Tony, then.
    My point exactly!!

    Unfortunately, my phone calls to John Humphreys and Jeremy Paxman were not returned, and I just could NOT get on TV.

    Should have had breast implants and eaten some insects, obviously.

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by geoff332 View Post
    I've always thought "precision bombing" was more unintentionally ironic.
    It's very precise, it's just horribly inaccurate...

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Although anti personal land mines are banned, it's still legal to use anti vehicle landmines.

    These are now being manufactured with the cluster effect. So if you or I stepped on these new landmines there would be 160 bits of metal in it.

    There is so much money to be made in weapons, that's the problem.

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Amazing how much Political and military clout oil has!

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    I understand that one can buy a 'bumper sticker' in the US which says:

    "How did our oil get under their sand?"

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Precision bombing with modern guided weapons is [/I]precisely[I] that, certainly when compared to carpet bombing with "iron bombs" (that is, unguided). The technology has made significant advances in recent years, which has also allowed a 50% reduction in the size of the warhead used by the RAF, specifically to reduce collateral damage. You might also like to look up the target discrimination software for the UK's Storm Shadow missile, which will abort the attack if there are significant changes to the target profile, eg if the car park of a building is full, vice empty, indicating occupation.

    Only 40 nations signed the Ottawa Treaty on anti-personnel mines, although many more have agreed to adopt its principles. Over 150 nations have declined to do so, including the US, Russia, China and significant swathes of Asia and the Middle East. The treaty has no impact on terrorists and insurgents who choose to make them either. I was going to add a map, but apparently I have run out of attachment space

    The Iraqis, who let's not forget previously used chemical weapons in the 80's and 90's, appeared to have gone out of their way to indicate that they had such weapons in the noughties, in an attempt to threaten and deter any response, a course of action which backfired disastrously for them. That said, the Americans appeared hell bent on regime change anyway. There was no obvious evidence that Al Qaeda were in Iraq at that time, unlike Afghanistan. The biggest failing, once the attack took place, was to hugely under-resource the ground forces needed for an occupation and to have no clear follow-on strategy, allowing an insurgency to develop before the country was back on its feet.

    IMHO

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by geoff332 View Post
    Am I the only one who stops reading at anything that starts with "According to the Daily Mail..."?
    Quite probably not. However, if you'd clicked on the link you'd know that their '45-minute-WMD' source was a report written by a Conservative MP rather than an inventive Dailymail Journalist.

    If you'd prefer to read the same story at The Times Online then it's here:

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle6948283.ece

    I don't particularly care who the publisher is, I read them all (Dailymail, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, Times) because I prefer a full and rich spectrum of reporting. A wide range of viewpoints and the freedom to express them is essential for a healthy democracy. Hence, the existence of the Dailymail should be celebrated as part of our free and democratic society in the UK.

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by Bubble View Post
    I don't particularly care who the publisher is, I read them all (Dailymail, Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, Times) because I prefer a full and rich spectrum of reporting. A wide range of viewpoints and the freedom to express them is essential for a healthy democracy. Hence, the existence of the Dailymail should be celebrated as part of our free and democratic society in the UK.
    "That was a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Paparazzi Party. In half an hour on BBC2..."
    Last edited by Barry Shnikov; 9th-December-2009 at 06:26 PM. Reason: another dagblamed pesky typo there, Musky...

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by Rhythm King View Post
    Precision bombing with modern guided weapons is [/I]precisely[I] that, certainly when compared to carpet bombing with "iron bombs" (that is, unguided). The technology has made significant advances in recent years, which has also allowed a 50% reduction in the size of the warhead used by the RAF, specifically to reduce collateral damage.
    Which is fine, unless you've pointed the bomb at the wrong thing/person in the first place, hence my comment about it being very precise but not accurate at all. With the amount of Afghan and Iraqi civilians who are being killed it's pretty clear that accuracy is not our strong point.

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    Re: My tables — meet it is I set it down

    Quote Originally Posted by Barry Shnikov View Post
    I understand that one can buy a 'bumper sticker' in the US which says:

    "How did our oil get under their sand?"

    Ha, nice one!

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