Work Your Brain — 09/06/06

• We Know The Who And The What, But What About The Why? — The (liberal)Girl Next Door asks what I’ve been asking all along: “Why out Valerie Plame?” The media seems content to have the mystery of who did the outing solved without wondering as to the why. Now that new evidence has come to light that Plame was working on the task force to determine whether or not Iraq had WMD, why was it so important to get her out of the way?
• But Bush has nothing on at all! — lambert @ CorrenteWire theorizes as to why there haven’t been any more terror attacks on American soil since 9/11 since we’re told every other day that an attack is right around the corner. If the terrorists are so competent and dangerous, why aren’t we living in a war-torn country where things are being blown up on a weekly basis? It can’t be that our security is safer; we’ve prove it isn’t.
  

  A fully credible explanation for the fact that the United States has suffered no terrorist attacks since 9/11 is that the threat posed by homegrown or imported terrorists — like that presented by Japanese Americans during World War II or by American Communists after it — has been massively exaggerated. Is it possible that the haystack is essentially free of needles?

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Tags: George W. Bush, terror attacks, 9/11, Terrorists, economy, irresponsible government, failed policy, Valerie Plame, WMD, Iraq, Conspiracy Theories, Matthew Fenton, National Naval Medical Center, Bathesda, Walter Reed, War, American soldiers, 101st Fighting Keyboarders

comments See also in Politics & Causes, Geekery, Blogging & Other Blogs, The World, 9-11 & Terrorism, Iraq & Afghanistan, Conspiracy Theories, The Middle East

Bush Administration Ignored CIA Intelligence, Same Old News

I watched 60 Minutes last night and I’ve been reading all of the related articles on Yahoo!News, The Washington Post, CNN, and Reuters. O.K. It’s all the same article. They all say the same thing. And really for those of us liberals who’ve been paying attention since 2002, it’s nothing new. In fact, there wasn’t anything in that report I hadn’t heard before, so it’s hard to get excited.

And I know none of the conservative right-wingers were paying attention anyway so it was just preaching to the choir. In fact, I stopped by Fox News and there’s no mention of the story on their website, not even something to refute Tyler Drumheller’s claims that the White House flat out ignored CIA intelligence that conflicted with what they needed to make the case for war in Iraq.

“The (White House) group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer interested,” he was quoted as saying in interview excerpts released by CBS on Friday.

“We said: ‘Well, what about the intel?’ And they said: ‘Well, this isn’t about intel anymore. This is about regime change’,” added Drumheller, whose CIA operation was assigned the task of debriefing the Iraqi official. [“Ex-CIA agent says WMD intelligence ignored” (Reuters)]

Tags: WMD, Tyler Drumheller, Fox News, Yahoo!News, Washington Post, CNN, Reuters, White House, CIA, Intelligence, Iraq, 60 Minutes

Bush Sold Us The War Based On The Biggest Sand Toilets In The World

So, back to those missing WMD we never found…remember when Bush told us that we found evidence of mobile biological laboratories in Iraq which further proved Sadaam was up to no good? Apparently they were just “the biggest sand toilets in the world” and Bush knew it and yet he like the incorrect “evidence” he had Libby leak to Judy Miller, he pushed the “find” of the trailers on the media as a victory of the war.

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq — not made public until now — had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories. [“Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case For War” (The Washington Post)]

Tags: George W. Bush, WMD, Saddam Hussein, Washington Post, lie, Conspiracy Theories, Iraq

The "Newest" Downing Street Memo

Yesterday, lots of leftist blogs were talking about The New York Times reporting on the “latest” memo revealing President Bush and Tony Blair’s nefairious plans to go to war in Iraq no matter what, even if it meant *gasp* tricking the world somehow.

Stamped “extremely sensitive,” the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair’s most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book “Lawless World,” which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president’s sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was “unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.” Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

[…]

Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.

“The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.”

It also described the president as saying, “The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam’s W.M.D,” referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea. [”Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says” (The New York Times)]

The information about the Downing Street Memos has been out for almost a year, but only now that George W. Bush’s approval ratings are in the toilet does the New York Times see fit to cover them.

[…]

In February 2002, a half-million people marched in New York City because we knew that this president was going to take us into a war based on lies. The denizens of Left Blogistan knew that this president was going to take us into a war based on lies. When the Downing Street memo first came out, the British, and anyone who bothers to read anything other than the New York Post and the New York Sun and watch anything other than Fox News, knew for certain the kind of chicanery in which Bush and Blair engaged in order to get us into this war.

And now the rest of the country should know. The question is whether they will still choose not to know, because to know is to be obligated to get involved with the political processes necessary to do something about it.[“Late isn’t always better than never” (Brilliant at Breakfast)]

So the New York Times is running a big story headlined Bush Was Set on Path to War, Memo by British Adviser Says, as if it’s news. The only real news here is that they’re treating it like it’s news. As it happens, The Guardian covered the story in February, as did a whole lot of bloggers, many of whom had been covering a little thing known as The Downing Street Memos for, ahem, quite some time. Suffice it to say, the reaction to the Times‘ piece is a bit, uh, jaded in some quarters. [“Is It Really “News” If It’s Not New?” (Shakespeare’s Sister)]

O.K. So, I kind of feel the whole thing is a non-event. Really, look around. It’s the next day and no one is really talking about it. It’s kind of yesterday’s non-news already.

Do I think it’s real? Yes.

However, I think that no one’s listening — particularly to The New York Times. The right wing won’t put any credit into anything The New York Times publishes that doesn’t feed their agenda because they insist it’s a liberal-biased rag despite the fact that Judy Miller apparently was being hand fed stories for years by the White House. The left doesn’t trust the Times because of the whole Judy Miller thing. Really, the Times has lost quite a bit of credibility on both sides.

Ayway, Shakespeare’s Sister is right, this isn’t news. It’s preaching to a tired, frustrated choir. The people who need to hear it aren’t listening and don’t want to know. They can’t know because they can’t be wrong. There can’t be any truth in what those memos say, not a shred, because then they wouldn’t be able to be so self-righteous.

Tags: Iraq, Downing Street Memo, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, New York Times, Judy Miller, politics, WMD, Saddam Hussein, Conspiracy Theories

Miller Didn’t Start The Fire

I’ve been thinking about Donklephant’s post by Callimachus this morning called “______ Lied”. The post itself has a liberal-biased tilt, but the original column, It Wasn’t Just Miller’s Story seems to be straight reporting to me and I think it’s something that many of us die-hard anti-Iraq-War-Bill-Clinton-loving liberal try very, very hard to ignore or forget.

The truth is that the fear of Suddam Huissen’s potential to wage nuclear destruction on his neighbors and the world didn’t start in January 2001 or even after September 11, 2001.

Here are a few past headlines from The New York Times:

• “Iraq Has Network of Outside Help on Arms, Experts Say”(November 1998)
• “U.S. Says Iraq Aided Production of Chemical Weapons in Sudan”(August 1998)
• “Iraq Suspected of Secret Germ War Effort” (February 2000)
• “Signs of Iraqi Arms Buildup Bedevil U.S. Administration” (February 2000)
• “Flight Tests Show Iraq Has Resumed a Missile Program” (July 2000) [“It Wasn’t Just Miller’s Story”]

It’s important to note here that despite recent accusations and theories that Judith Miller single-handedly convinced the American public that an invasion of Iraq was not only necessary but the right thing to do, she shared a byline on only one of these articles, the rest were written by others. Also, The New York Times wasn’t the only paper making these Clinton-era claims; The Washington Post’s archives contains similar articles.

Clinton administration officials, intelligence officials, U.N. weapons inspectors, and international analysts at the time claimed that Iraq would be “capable within months — and possibly just weeks or days — of threatening its neighbors with an arsenal of chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons;” it was believed that Iraq was “still hiding tons of nerve gas” and was “seeking to obtain uranium from a rogue nation or terrorist groups to complete as many as four nuclear warheads.” It was believed that Hussein spent $120 billion in oil revenue and “devoted his intelligence service to an endless game of cat and mouse to hide his suspected weapons caches from United Nations inspections.” He was reportedly “scouring the world for tools to build new weapons” and there were concerns that he was closer to building a nuclear weapon than he was in 1991.[“It Wasn’t Just Miller’s Story”]

Heck, the Clinton administration was so worried about Iraq’s growing nuclear program, that they bombed Iraq for four days in 1998 .

From 1998 through 2000, the Times editorial page warned that “without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year” and that “future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again.” Otherwise, Iraq could “restore its ability to deliver biological and chemical weapons against potential targets in the Middle East.” “The world,” it said, “cannot leave Mr. Hussein free to manufacture horrific germs and nerve gases and use them to terrorize neighboring countries.”

[…]

The Times was not alone, of course. On Jan. 29, 2001, The Post editorialized that “of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous — or more urgent — than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade’s efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf,” including “intelligence photos that show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.”

[…]

As we wage what the Times now calls “the continuing battle over the Bush administration’s justification for the war in Iraq,” we will have to grapple with the stubborn fact that the underlying rationale for the war was already in place when this administration arrived.[“It Wasn’t Just Miller’s Story”]

If the danger from Hussien and Iraq was so immenent, why did we as a nation wait so long?

If the danger from Hussein and Iraq was so real, why did we struggle to find allies to back us up?

If Hussein really is the insane dictator, willing to use chemical warfare on his own people — which we know is true — why then did he not use these weapons of mass distruction on American troops marching toward Baghdad? One argument the right likes to give is that Hussein shipped them to other countries to hide them, but I question why he would make WMD and then not use them during a time of war?

If there were WMD and real proof of them, why did the Bush administration try to discredit Joseph Wilson, a retired diplomat, when he refuted their claims of evidence that Iraq had bought uranium from Nigeria? Why would they need to if the evidence was so strong?

I have a lot of questions, but somehow I don’t think we’ll ever know the whole truth.

Tags: Judy Miller, Saddam Hussein, Bill Clinton, Iraq, George W. Bush, politics, WMD, Joe Wilson

Where In The World Are Saddam’s Nuclear & Bioweapons Scientists Now?

There’s a rather unsettling article over at Mother Jones today by Kurt Pitzer called “In the Garden of Armageddon.” The onsite blurb reads: “They were Iraq’s only real WMDs. The U.S. refused to secure them. Now Saddam’s nuclear and bioweapons scientists are dispersed and more dangerous than ever.”

He said his name was Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, and he showed me a printout of a prewar Washington Post story in which he was named as one of the Iraqi weapons scientists whom the U.S. government had very much wanted to interview…

… He had tried contacting U.S. troops, but they had rebuffed him and threatened him with arrest if he showed up again…

…At first I didn’t know whether to believe him. But that night, at his urging, I dialed the Washington number of David Albright, a former American member of the United Nations weapons inspections team in Iraq. When I explained who had given me his name, the line went silent for a moment.

“You are actually talking to Obeidi?” Albright finally asked. “Where is he? What did he say?”…

…Albright had met Obeidi in Iraq in the 1990s, when the U.N. inspectors were dismantling Saddam’s WMD programs. Saddam had kept Obeidi’s identity secret longer than that of any other scientist, Albright said. If anyone could say for sure what had happened to Iraq’s nuclear program, it was him…Obeidi repeated to Albright what he had told me — that the Iraqi nuclear program had been dead since the start of U.N. weapons inspections in 1991. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with caution.

“David, there are some things the inspectors never found,” he said. “I am speaking of some important materials and documents. But I am afraid of saying more until I can be sure of my safety.” [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

Albright promised Obeidi to contact the intelligence community on his behalf. This was a few days after the U.S. took Baghdad.

Just weeks earlier, before the invasion, President Bush had railed against Saddam for intimidating his WMD scientists and hiding them from inspectors. Colin Powell had appeared before the United Nations Security Council and warned that Obeidi’s centrifuge program posed a threat to the world. It was hard to explain why, having gone to war ostensibly to get control of Iraq’s dangerous knowledge, the United States was now doing so little to follow through. [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

Despite the U.S.’s claims of concern that Iraq might have the capability to develop WMD and had done so and despite the fact that Obeidi had “blueprints and prototype pieces for building centrifuges to enrich uranium to bomb grade” buried in his garden — on Saddam’s son’s orders — it would be more than a month before any U.S. official showed an interest.

This was why Obeidi was so anxious. On any given day he might be arrested by U.S. forces who would consider him a “bad guy,” or killed by Saddam loyalists who would see him as a collaborator, or kidnapped by some other country interested in what he knew. The decision to come forward had been a hard one…

…The scientists who pulled it off are very gifted men and women, many of whom are now out of work. Their names are still being kept secret by the international agencies familiar with their work. But a source close to one of those agencies recently said that of the 200-some scientists at the top of its nuclear list, all but three remain unaccounted for. In a country with porous borders, where everyone — but especially those associated with the former regime — is in danger every day, many experts say at least some scientists are bound to be tempted to sell their knowledge to the highest bidder. And as the Pakistani network exposed last year shows, the nuclear black market is alive and well…

…Nobody knows how many Iraqi scientists may have been lured over the borders into Iran, Syria, or beyond. Nobody knows because no one is keeping tabs. But several observers agree that so little attention is being paid to Iraq’s scientists, the war may actually have increased the chances of nuclear capabilities proliferating beyond the country’s borders. Between its unemployed scientists and the disappearance of large amounts of WMD-related materials from former weapons sites, Iraq now poses a nightmare scenario, according to Ray McGovern, who spent 27 years analyzing intelligence for the CIA and afterward cofounded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. “The danger is much more acute, both from the proliferation side and the terrorism side,” McGovern says. “Before we invaded, there was no evidence that Iraq had any plan or incentive to proliferate. They didn’t even have a current plan to develop WMDs. They just hadn’t been doing it. Now, my God, we have a magnet attracting all manner of foreign jihadists to a place where the WMD expertise is suddenly unprotected. It just boggles the mind.”

IRAQI SCIENTISTS have good reason to fear what might happen if they offer to cooperate with the United States. Obeidi’s former boss and Saddam’s top science adviser, General Amer al-Saadi, turned himself in to U.S. authorities just before I met Obeidi. He was promptly jailed and kept in custody for at least two years; a military spokesman told the Associated Press last year that the U.S. was also detaining up to a dozen other scientists. The chemist Mohammed Munim al-Izmerly — also said to have worked on Iraq’s former WMD programs — was taken into custody for questioning in April 2003. Ten months later his body was dropped off in a U.S. body bag at a Baghdad hospital. He had been killed by a blow to the head. [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

So, eventually, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA tracked Obeidi down and the DIA summoned him. He met first with the DIA which instructed him not to talk to the CIA. So much for communication and cooperation between intelligence agencies, eh? But then, Obeidi’s fears came true — First the CIA sent armed operatives to his home who took away samples of his secret document cache.

Then, early on the morning of June 3, 2003, more than a dozen soldiers jumped over Obeidi’s garden wall, kicked in his front door, and put him and his family facedown on their living room floor at gunpoint. Obeidi’s wife and children watched as he was handcuffed and put in a Humvee. Evidently, the Army had finally caught wind of Obeidi’s significance — and, just as evidently, the troops knew nothing of their own intelligence agencies’ contacts with him. [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

Fortunately for him, the CIA intervened and had him released. He smartly went public and gave an interview to CNN and the CIA quickly arranged for he and his family to be moved to safety so he could be interrogated.

And then of course, there had been one of the really big goof-ups of the CIA…

On June 26, the CIA posted a press release about Obeidi’s cache — the most valuable WMD evidence the U.S. has yet obtained in Iraq — on its official website. It also put up digital photos of the components and even one of the key centrifuge diagrams. The pictures, which Albright says could be “incredibly useful” to any regime trying to start a covert nuclear program, were online for almost a week — long enough to be downloaded and made freely available on the Internet — before the agency took them down. Literally buried for 12 years, some of Saddam’s hoard of nuclear knowledge got out because of the U.S. government, not in spite of it.

“Before we invaded, there was no evidence that Iraq had any plan or incentive to proliferate,” says former CIA analyst Ray McGovern. “Now, my God, we have a magnet attracting… jihadists to a place where the WMD expertise is suddenly unprotected. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with these guys for months,” says former weapons inspector David Albright. “But by now they’re probably so jaded and suspicious that they want nothing to do with the U.S.” [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

The International Atomic Energy Agency compiled a list in the 1990’s of participants in Saddam’s WMD program. The list had 2,000 names on it. Most of these people are unaccounted for and the border of Iraq are obviously open. Certainly anyone with the experience or knowledge these scientists and technicians would be valuable to any country or organization wishing to jumpstart their nuclear weapons program — Iran and al-Q come to mind. These people could probably name their price on the black market. That doesn’t sound like the world is safer now, does it? Imagine a 9-11 but with nuclear weapons.

“The proliferation risk is higher than it was before, and a chaotic situation means this technology is going to spread,” says Robert Baer, who spent 21 years as a case officer with the CIA in the Middle East. If the administration had been serious about neutralizing Saddam’s weapons program, he says, “the troops would have been securing equipment at weapons sites as they invaded, and they would have been looking for scientists…. It tells you that this war had nothing to do with WMDs.” [“In the Garden of Armageddon”]

Whether or not you believe that Saddam had WMD at the time the U.S. invasion of Iraq began, you have to admit that obviously it was complete chaos once we got to Baghdad. We set our sights on getting Saddam no matter the cost and didn’t worry about securing weapons armories (from which insurgents would steal to rage their war against the U.S.) and we didn’t think too hard on the people we needed to find, the people who knew enough to be a danger to the world and a treasure to terrorists or anti-U.S. countries. More proof that we didn’t go in with a good solid plan.

Read the whole story

Pitzer and Obeidi cowrote The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind, which is currently available in hardback.

I’ll be adding that to my wishlist, I think.

Tags: Saddam Hussein, WMD, Iraq, Conspiracy Theories, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi

CNN: “Dead Wrong — Inside an Intelligence Meltdown.”

CNN will be airing a special entitled Dead Wrong — Inside an Intelligence Meltdown this coming Sunday night. In it Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005, is one of several insiders interviewed.

A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state’s presentation to the United Nations on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was “the lowest point” in his life. [“Former aide: Powell WMD speech ‘lowest point in my life’” (CNN.com)]

Makes you wonder what he knows that we don’t, doesn’t it? I’m thinking of that song from one of the Charlie Brown musicals “If I knew then what I know now.” If only I knew then and now.

In preparation for Powell’s Valentines’ Day (2003) call to arms, Wilkerson makes it sound like Powell was unprepared and had not been given all of the information he needed to be well-prepared.

“(Powell) came through the door … and he had in his hands a sheaf of papers, and he said, ‘This is what I’ve got to present at the United Nations according to the White House, and you need to look at it,’” Wilkerson says in the program. “It was anything but an intelligence document. It was, as some people characterized it later, sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose.”

Wilkerson and Powell spent four days and nights in a CIA conference room with then-Director George Tenet and other top officials trying to ensure the accuracy of the presentation, Wilkerson says. [“Former aide: Powell WMD speech ‘lowest point in my life’”(CNN.com)]

According to Wilkerson, what they later discovered was that it was innacurate despite their four days and nights. At least one of their sources was untrustworthy — something Powell didn’t know at the time, though apparently the Defense Intelligence Agency knew. More lack of communication between departments and government tentacles.

In one dramatic accusation in his speech, Powell showed slides alleging that Saddam had bioweapons labs mounted on trucks that would be almost impossible to find.

“In fact, Secretary Powell was not told that one of the sources he was given as a source of this information had indeed been flagged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as a liar, a fabricator,” says David Kay, who served as the CIA’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. That source, an Iraqi defector had never been debriefed by the CIA, was known within the intelligence community as “Curveball.”

After searching Iraq for several months across the summer of 2003, Kay began e-mailing Tenet to tell him the WMD evidence was falling apart. At one point, Wilkerson says, Tenet called Powell to tell him the claims about mobile bioweapons labs were apparently not true. [“Former aide: Powell WMD speech ‘lowest point in my life’”(CNN.com)]

So, more conflicting information spilling into the media. I’m going to have to try to remember to set my DVR so I don’t forget to watch this.

Somewhere out there really is the truth. I’d like to find it, but I’m starting to feel like we’ll never really know the whole story.

Tags: CNN, Iraq, Colin Powell, Intelligence, WMD, Conspiracy Theories, politics

On Politics and Arm-chair Politicians

Talking politics is a quick way to make friends and enemies these days. Personally, I have tried not to discuss politics or religion in my journals or with my friends “back home”. For the most part I discovered that some people tend to take both subjects way too personally and feel the fanatical need to convert everyone they know to the “right” way of thinking which is of course always their way. Some of my friends “back home” had a penchant for getting into loud, angry, pissing matches over politics, religion, and sometimes even books and movies and while I enjoy a good debate, I don’t like shouting matches or banging my head against a wall.

For the most part, many people either make up their minds and cling to those opinions no matter what the facts or opinions of others or they do as their parents or spouses do and believe what their parents or spouses believe. Sometimes both options play a part. Unfortunately many people never let exeriences or newly learned facts to change their opinions; they cling to the belief that they are right despite everything.

Some of my friends “back home” are like that which is why I don’t allow such topics on the mailing list we all use to keep track of each other. People become too easily offended, emails fly back and forth because people are offended or they want to force others to see things their way. It’s all very unpleasant and sad.

I like to keep an open-mind. I won’t say that I don’t think I’m right. I just admit that I could be wrong. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me. In fact, my opinions on many things have changed over the last 33 years. Things I believed in with all my heart when I was a teenager have proven themselves not true or have become questionable as my experiences and new facts have reared their ugly heads. I may still be a bit naive. I may still not understand every facet of everything going on in the world, but at the very least I have an open-mind and I accept when I’m wrong and I find talking, debating with others either strengthens my beliefs or changes them.

I think it’s a sign of a mature individual…though I don’t know that I’m all that mature or that I’m even mentally healthy at times.

So, I’ve come to enjoy in my new life the ability to have mature, adult conversations about politics with people here and people I’ve met online — people who don’t just shout rhetoric back and forth and people who have a clue not only about what is going on in the world but don’t believe everything they hear or read.

So, here is my political stance for those of you who are interested:

• I have voted for every President who has been in office since I started voting at 18 years old — I’m 33 now.
• I have been registered as a Republican, a Democrat, and an Independent at various times in my life. Currently, I am registered as a Democrat though 3 months ago I was an Independent.
• I have never believed that we should invade Iraq. I never thought they had weapons of mass destruction last year. I can’t believe the Bush Administration keeps insisting that is why were are there. I don’t know why other countries who do indeed have weapons of mass destruction have been left to their own devices. I believe we were lied to and if we weren’t lied to then the Bush Administration can’t admit they made an error in judgement and I don’t know which is worse.
• I was for invading Afghanistan but very disappointed that Bush didn’t finish the job.
• I am offended that Bush doesn’t think the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries is an issue. The companies might be saving money but they aren’t passing along that savings to the unemployed masses.
• I am offended that Bush’s administration thinks that the 1.25 million jobs they “created” in the last few months should quell the rising voices when the jobs that have been created are not equivallent in skill or money to the ones that millions of Americans have lost over the last 4 years.
• I am horrified that Bush wants to change the law to keep Americans who love each other from any kind of union, whether you call it a marriage or not, and the rights and benefits such a union should have.
• I am against abortion but believe it’s not my place to tell anyone they can’t have one for whatever reason.
• I am against the draft.
• I am against any merge of church and state and yet Bush’s administration is constantly dragging religion into their politics.
• Bush’s administration scares the hell out of me. I really believe they are out of control and believe that they are too powerful to be ruled by the laws, standards, and beliefs they hold everyone else to.
• It scares me to talk to people who still believe there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It scares me to listen to people who swear by every word that comes out of Bush’s mouth.
• It scares me that people still think there was a connection between Sadaam and 9/11. I never thought there was and it makes me sick to think that propaganda was used and so widely believed.
• It scares me that people don’t realize that some of those prisoners in those Iraqi prisons were innocent bystanders who were arrested by accident, tortured and humiliated, and even killed. People were killed in inhumane and compassionless ways and yet we are justified because other people that look like them caused 9/11 and other people who look like them have been killing hostages in the Middle East — ironically, the terrorists weren’t in Iraq before we arrived and opened the door but their presence now is used as a reason why we invaded…
• I am afraid of the Homeland Security and the Big Brother concept that it is.
• I am afraid that the terrorists have won by causing us to step closer to losing the freedoms they hate us for.

Tags: politics, dysfunctional drama, George W. Bush, outsourcing, Afghanistan, Gay Rights, abortion, pro-choice, WMD, innocent, detainees, Homeland Security, Terrorists