Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
signed by 144 members of the 275-member house, according to Nassar al-Rubaie, the leader of the Sadrist bloc.
The Sadrist bloc, which sees the U.S.-led forces as an occupying army, has pushed similar bills before, but this was the first time it had garnered the support of a majority of lawmakers.
The bill would require the Iraqi government to seek approval from parliament before it requests an extension of the U.N. mandate for foreign forces to be in Iraq, al-Rubaie said. It also calls for a timetable for the troop withdrawal and a freeze on the size of the foreign forces.
Comedy in the face of facts, its why right wing humor never really gets any play.
They dont understand to be Funny comedy has to refelct the facts not deny them.
At least give a COMPLETE scenario.
We are fighting the forces of barbarism that want to rip up the Iraqi Constitution and plunge women into the 8th Century. We are fighting the people who want to run the lives of 25 million Iraqis at the point of a gun, just like Saddam. We are fighting Al Qaeda who is willing to commit any unspeakable atrocity, even use children homicide bombers, in order to defeat America. We are fighting Iran who wants control over Iraq and is killing our people everyday. Do you not get that? Or do you just not care? You think we should run away from that? No, Saddam did not kill 6 million in gas chambers, but he did kill thousands of Iraqis and started two very bloody wars. Just how many people would Saddam have had to kill before you tried to stop him? Thousands of Iraqi deaths and two wars did not quite get to the tipping point for you?
Originally Posted by Care4all
who are you saying we are fighting in iraq, a HITLER? LOL!
did iraq declare war against us that our country doesn't know about?
No but he did declare war against an allied nation (Kuwait)
csm? This was gulf war 1, we already went to war because of Kuwait! lol...you are tryin' a bit too hard! lol
was saddam in the process of killing 6 million jews in gas chambers?
Good thing Kurds dont count eh?
The Kurds in the no-fly zone that we were protecting already? or the Kurds that were masacred with biological weapons that we probably armed him with, and while we sat back and turned a blind eye to it? What Kurds are you talking about "counting"?
was saddam loaded to the gill with tanks and bombers and an army second to none like hitler and had he captured all of his surrounding countries?
Um yeah, he had one of the largest armies in the region.
PLEASE, enough of the false outrage...
where were you and your country when saddam was killing those thousands of people, huh? sitting on your buddha butt, letting those poor people die, and being the country that armed him a great deal, we have NOTHING to be proud about or to act holier than thou about.
you don't come to people's ''rescue'' a decade or two AFTER the genocide!
how many iraqis have our actions killed? Do you know how many innocents have died as ''collateral damage''?
oh, we don't keep count, guess they don't count as human beings, huh?
------------------------------
the military occupation is winning us nothing, it's a band aid.
Ummm nooooooooooo. 95% of saddams army and wmd's and traditional amour were wiped out after gulf war 1, we did a fine job of making him useless.
And Iran has a bigger army than Saddam.
France, Russia and China were being bribed to lift sanctions and as soon as they were gone, Saddam would rearm his military with state of the art equipment and return to mass production of chemical and biological weapons and research on Nuclear warheads.
You have stated this before, and I find it quite amusing that you believe Saddam would get anywhere near "rearming his military with state of the art weapons," after bribing nations to lift sanctions.
As if the US, Britian or any neighbouring countries would allow anything like that to happen.
I suggest you do a google of who and where Saddam got his weapons. We didn't sell him weapons. France, Russia, Germany, and Europe sold him weapons. France built him a nuclear reactor as well and germany supplied him most of the dual use equipment for his chemical and biological labs as well as the materials for the research and production.
Now we did sell him a couple unarmed light helicopters ONCE.
For being IN THE KNOW you sure get a lot of stuff wrong.....
Made in the USA - Part II
More on the connection between the United States,
American corporations and Iraq's weapons programs
Iraq would never have developed its chemical-, biological- and nuclear-weapons program -- or even its conventional missiles -- without technology and material support supplied by a phalanx of American and international corporations. It also helped mightily that officials in the first Bush presidency -- many of whom now work for George W. Bush -- were willing to look the other way or directly assist Saddam Hussein's regime.
Between 1985 and 1990, the U.S. government approved 771 licenses for exports of biological agents, high-tech equipment and military items to Iraq, reported Representative Sam Gejdenson (D-Connecticut) in 1991. Those exports were valued at $1.5 billion, said Gejdenson, who was the chairman of the House Subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the time.
"The United States spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted . . . We continued to approve this equipment until just weeks before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait," declared, according to a Congressional transcript.
Gejdenson also told his subcommittee that the State Department refused to impose controls on the export of biological toxins to Iraq until 1989, even though it knew Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq war as well as Kurdish civilians.
And, he added, the administration of the elder George Bush had lobbied, right up to "July 27, 1990 -- six days before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait," against a proposed House amendment that would have restricted agricultural credits to Iraq.
In a 1991 speech on the House floor, Texas Democratic Congressman Henry Gonzalez denounced the billions in financial support given to Hussein with assistance from both the Reagan and Bush administrations. Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), an Italian, multinational banking concern with American operations based in New York, delivered more than $4 billion in loans to Iraq, during the 1980s.
Those loans, unreported to U.S. banking officials, were funneled through BNL's Atlanta branch. The subsequent scandal eventually resulted in the conviction of several BNL employees for fraud.
And yet Gonzalez was able to cite a Federal Reserve document showing that the secretary of state for the first President Bush actually discussed these criminally suspect BNL loans with Saddam Hussein. Investigators also found BNL-related telexes between April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and the State Department in Washington.
Gonzalez also reported that U.S. officials under Reagan and Bush routinely ignored evidence that Iraq was using its weapons of mass destruction. He cited congressional testimony by Paul Freedenberg, the chief export-licensing official at the Department of Commerce during parts of both the Reagan and Bush administrations, to underscore that point.
"In the summer of 1988, a number of licenses were pending with regard to technology transfers to Iraq," testified Freedenberg. "I asked for official guidance with regard to what the licensing policy would be toward Iraq, since by then there was credible evidence of the use of poison gas by the Iraqis against their own people and also against the Iranians."
Freedenberg told Congress that he suggested the "imposition of foreign controls" be used to justify the denial of these export licenses. But the National Security Council told him to treat these exports as "normal trade." http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/USmadeIraq.html#P2
No sanctions and how do we stop him? You didn't like our Invasion when we had cause, what cause would we have once sanctions are gone? As for money, he had BILLIONS. He had oil and he had all the money he made off the Food scam. How did he bribe them, he sold them oil for half the price basicly. But then any person with half a brain already knows THAT.
You can NOT have it both ways.... He can not have been no threat, yet a threat we would crush at a "later" date.
yeah, i sure do don't i?
Lets start with your "Oil For Food"
Myth: Saddam Hussein's regime raised over $21.3 billion in illicit revenue by subverting the Oil-for-Food Program (OFFP).
Fact: This figure was initially provided on November 15, 2004 at a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations that is conducting one of the five congressional inquiries into the OFFP. The Subcommittee distributed a chart that showed that while Iraq was under UN Sanctions, between 1991 - 2003, the Saddam Hussein regime obtained illicit revenues of $21.3 billion. The chart clearly indicates that the OFFP was responsible for a small share of this total and that most of the illicit revenue came from other sources.
http://oilforfoodfacts.org/
Three major investigations by the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations, the Iraq Survey Group (Duelfer Report) and the Government Accountability Office have now reached the same conclusion: most of the illicit money Saddam Hussein's regime pilfered came from oil smuggling, not from the Oil-for-Food Program (OFFP). While OFFP had its share of problems, investigators who want to "follow the money" might want to take a closer look at Hussein's smuggling operation that appears to have generated as much as $14 billion for his regime.
http://oilforfoodfacts.org/numbers.aspx#PSI
comment | posted November 18, 2004 (December 6, 2004 issue)
UN Oil for Food 'Scandal'
Joy Gordon
"Rarely mentioned, either at the hearings or in the press coverage, was the fundamental distinction between the policies established by the Secretariat and the UN agencies and those that result from decisions of particular member states within the highly politicized Security Council. For example, the CIA report says that the bulk of the illicit transactions were "government to government agreements" between Iraq and a few other countries, for trade outside the OFF program. According to the report, they resulted in income to Iraq of $7.5 billion.
The largest of these arrangements was with Jordan--revenue from which totaled about $4.5 billion. This trade arrangement was the single largest source of Iraqi income outside the OFF program. From 1990 until the OFF program began in late 1996, "Jordan was the key to Iraq's financial survival," according to the report. Why didn't "the UN" do something about it? Because the Security Council--where the United States was by far the single most influential member--decided in May 1991 that no action would be taken to interfere in Iraq's trade with Jordan, America's closest ally in the Arab world......
......But when pricing irregularities were large enough that they might have indicated kickbacks, the UN staff did notice. On more than seventy occasions, the staff brought these to the attention of the 661 Committee, the Security Council body charged with implementing the sanctions. On no occasion did the United States block or delay the contracts to prevent the kickbacks from occurring. Although the United States, citing security concerns, blocked billions of dollars of humanitarian contracts--$5 billion were on hold as of July 2002--it never took action to stop kickbacks, even when they were obvious and well documented.........
........Far from giving Saddam a free hand, the OFF program involved extensive monitoring and oversight. The government of Iraq first had to submit a list of every single item it hoped to purchase in the coming six months, and the UN staff had to approve the list. Once Iraq had signed a contract with a vendor, the contract was circulated to UNSCOM (later UNMOVIC), to see if there was anything that could be used for military purposes. Every member of the Security Council had the opportunity to review every contract, and each member could block or delay any contract for imports. Every member of the Security Council also had to approve every contract for the sale of oil. If there was cash paid under the table, it did not happen for lack of oversight."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041206/gordon
PLEASE, enough of the false outrage...
where were you and your country when saddam was killing those thousands of people, huh? sitting on your buddha butt, letting those poor people die, and being the country that armed him a great deal, we have NOTHING to be proud about or to act holier than thou about.
you don't come to people's ''rescue'' a decade or two AFTER the genocide!
how many iraqis have our actions killed? Do you know how many innocents have died as ''collateral damage''?
oh, we don't keep count, guess they don't count as human beings, huh?
------------------------------
the military occupation is winning us nothing, it's a band aid.
Lets start with your "Oil For Food"
Myth: Saddam Hussein's regime raised over $21.3 billion in illicit revenue by subverting the Oil-for-Food Program (OFFP).
Fact: This figure was initially provided on November 15, 2004 at a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations that is conducting one of the five congressional inquiries into the OFFP. The Subcommittee distributed a chart that showed that while Iraq was under UN Sanctions, between 1991 - 2003, the Saddam Hussein regime obtained illicit revenues of $21.3 billion. The chart clearly indicates that the OFFP was responsible for a small share of this total and that most of the illicit revenue came from other sources.
http://oilforfoodfacts.org/
Three major investigations by the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations, the Iraq Survey Group (Duelfer Report) and the Government Accountability Office have now reached the same conclusion: most of the illicit money Saddam Hussein's regime pilfered came from oil smuggling, not from the Oil-for-Food Program (OFFP). While OFFP had its share of problems, investigators who want to "follow the money" might want to take a closer look at Hussein's smuggling operation that appears to have generated as much as $14 billion for his regime.
http://oilforfoodfacts.org/numbers.aspx#PSI
comment | posted November 18, 2004 (December 6, 2004 issue)
UN Oil for Food 'Scandal'
Joy Gordon
"Rarely mentioned, either at the hearings or in the press coverage, was the fundamental distinction between the policies established by the Secretariat and the UN agencies and those that result from decisions of particular member states within the highly politicized Security Council. For example, the CIA report says that the bulk of the illicit transactions were "government to government agreements" between Iraq and a few other countries, for trade outside the OFF program. According to the report, they resulted in income to Iraq of $7.5 billion.
The largest of these arrangements was with Jordan--revenue from which totaled about $4.5 billion. This trade arrangement was the single largest source of Iraqi income outside the OFF program. From 1990 until the OFF program began in late 1996, "Jordan was the key to Iraq's financial survival," according to the report. Why didn't "the UN" do something about it? Because the Security Council--where the United States was by far the single most influential member--decided in May 1991 that no action would be taken to interfere in Iraq's trade with Jordan, America's closest ally in the Arab world......
......But when pricing irregularities were large enough that they might have indicated kickbacks, the UN staff did notice. On more than seventy occasions, the staff brought these to the attention of the 661 Committee, the Security Council body charged with implementing the sanctions. On no occasion did the United States block or delay the contracts to prevent the kickbacks from occurring. Although the United States, citing security concerns, blocked billions of dollars of humanitarian contracts--$5 billion were on hold as of July 2002--it never took action to stop kickbacks, even when they were obvious and well documented.........
........Far from giving Saddam a free hand, the OFF program involved extensive monitoring and oversight. The government of Iraq first had to submit a list of every single item it hoped to purchase in the coming six months, and the UN staff had to approve the list. Once Iraq had signed a contract with a vendor, the contract was circulated to UNSCOM (later UNMOVIC), to see if there was anything that could be used for military purposes. Every member of the Security Council had the opportunity to review every contract, and each member could block or delay any contract for imports. Every member of the Security Council also had to approve every contract for the sale of oil. If there was cash paid under the table, it did not happen for lack of oversight."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041206/gordon
Ummm nooooooooooo. 95% of saddams army and wmd's and traditional amour were wiped out after gulf war 1, we did a fine job of making him useless.
And Iran has a bigger army than Saddam.
Saddam would rearm his military with state of the art equipment and return to mass production of chemical and biological weapons and research on Nuclear warheads. .
I still stand by my assertion that he would never have gotten any where near "arming his military with state of the art equipment".
