Posts Made By: Tom Rodstrom

What do you mean by defeat Bu$h?
What do you mean by any cost?

It seems that you are trying to make a claim that anyone who wants to defeat Bu$h is in league with Al Qaeda. That's a brilliant strategy. Do you work in the White House?

I am doing my best to see that Bu$h is defeated in the next election by any legal means. For me, within the limits of my means, cost is no object.

I also want to see Al Qaeda destroyed completely. To do that you must discredit their ideology as well as kill or capture their members.

I can't believe Bu$h's latest move.

Violence is growing and our troops are dying in Iraq. We are holding on to moderate Arab support by a thread, trying to convince them that the US will treat them fairly.

Bin Laden claims that we are a puppet of Israel and that we are only interested in oil, in order to recruit followers and garner support amount the rest of the Moslem world.

What does he do at this critical juncture? In a major policy shift, he approves Sharon's plan to keep Israeli settlements in the West Bank which the UN and the rest of the world considers to be Arab land. He does this even before the Israeli parliament approves the plan!

With a leader like that in the White House, our troops won't be coming home anytime soon. With this one move he has probably signed the death warrants for more GI's than any actual traitor since Benedict Arnold. It is a STUPID, RECKLESS move with no discernible upside for the United States. Sharon, of course is quite happy.

Last year while I was watching the NBC Nightly News, the commentator who was interviewing Richard Perle called him "the father of the war in Iraq". That is how I first found out about the neoconservatives and their huge influence on the Bush White House.

Here is some information on Perle:
>>> From 1969 to 1980, he worked as a staffer for Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington. He lost one of his positions after the FBI revealed that he had passed on classified information to Israel.

I call this treason. Perle clearly showed that his loyalty was NOT to the United States, but look who Bu$h hires as an advisor.
>>> In July 2001 George W. Bush appointed Perle chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, ...

Here are some of the people he associates with:
>>> Perle is co-founder of the right-wing Project for the New American Century (PNAC),...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

Notice the members:
>>> Present and former members include Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Richard Perle, Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, William J. Bennett, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Ellen Bork,...

More about neoconservatives:
>>> Neoconservatives and Israel

>>> The neoconservatives also support a robust American stance on Israel. The neoconservative influenced Project for a New American Century called for an Israel no longer dependent on American aid through the removal of major threats in the region.

>>> The interest in Israel, and the large proportion of Jewish neoconservatives has led to the question of "dual loyalty." A number of critics, such as Pat Buchanan, have accused them of putting Israeli interests above those of America. In turn these critics have been labeled as anti-Semites by many neoconservatives (which in turn has led to accusations of professional smearing, and then paranoia and so on).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism_(United_States)



With these neoconservatives in power, the war in Iraq was a done deal, just looking for an excuse. WMD's and threats to America were just excuses to start a war that these people had pushed for years. The problem is that it is that these policies and the war in Iraq are in the best interests of Israel, not the United States.

Troops just killed a team of TV journalists. These guys were professionals who know the dangers and we can assume took every possible precaution. If they were killed, then I think that it is safe to assume that Iraqi claims of hundreds of civilian deaths is probably true. Not very good PR for winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi's.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&ncid=736&e=5&u=/ap/20040419/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_journalists_killed

The documents that the yellowcake allegation was based on were fake. It took the UN less than a day to discover it, but this administration used it as the basis for Bush's claim even after the administration was warned by Wilson.

I believe that Wilson said he witnessed a short conversation between Baghdad Bob and an African official, but that he did not know what was discussed.

It appears that we are using well established Israeli techniques to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi's. They are working so well to bring peace to Israel and the Occupied Territories, Rummy & crew must have thought they were a wonderful idea for Iraq.

http://www.btselem.org/English/Publications/Summaries/Routine_Torture.asp

The neoconservatives in charge of the Pentagon are closely tied with the Israeli military so I would not be surprised to see other abuses similar to the ones brought to light by the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem.

http://www.btselem.org/English/About_Btselem/Index.asp

This site only show one side of the story, but there is a lot of information that you would not normally see elsewhere. I believe that with any story there are two sides and that if you read both sides, you will find the truth somewhere in the middle.

Their web site has another hard to find piece of information, Israeli and Palestinian casualties since 1987. It clearly shows that the Oslo accords which were founded on Yitzhak Rabin's "Land for Peace" initiative were working. Despite the existence of the Plo, Hezbolla and Hamas, very few Israeli's were killed in 1999 and early 2000. After Rabin was killed by a right wing fanatic, Israel dropped the "Land for Peace" policy and started on a course to keep as much of the Occupied Territories in Gaza and the West Bank as possible. Richard Perle and other American neoconservatives were instrumental in crafting this new policy.

At the last meeting of the Oslo accords in 2000, Arafat was offered a "Swiss cheese" nation dotted with settlements and checkpoints, no right of return for Palestinians displaced from Israel, and not even control of the al-Aqsa mosque which is the third holiest site in all of Islam. He had no choice but to walk out or his own people would have turned on him. The current intifada started after Sharon, considered a "butcher" by most Palestinians visited the al-Aqsa mosque with about 500 armed Israeli police.

http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Total_Casualties.asp

It looks like Ashcroft is joining the fray, you know, Attorney General John Ashcroft , the man who's biggest claim to fame was loosing an election to a dead man before he was selected by Bu$h to enforce the laws of the land.

From Saturday's Times by Fox Butterfield::

"The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time. The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?ex=1084680000&en=5d0df14005de1a74&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1

On page 6 of The Utah Sheriff's Association is a nice picture of McCotter, Wolfowitz and what appears to be Gen. Karpinski.

http://www.utahsheriffs.org/pdf/USA%20Newsletter%20Mar04.pdf

I don't see any postings since about 3 PM. Hope I see this one.

I just tried starting a post from a Politics forum thread and it showed up on the Day in the Life of the Administrator thread. This is a second try.

I see what happened. When you are in a forum. The forum box at the top of the Post New Message page does not default to the forum of the thread you are in.

I guess that that makes this a bug report!

I don't see any posts in the Politics forum since about 3:30 PM. I hops this one shows up. I had to go to a thread, click a new threadm, then select the right forum at the top.