Iraqi WMDs Continue to Leak

C.I.A. Is Said to Have Bought and Destroyed Iraqi Chemical Weapons - NYTimes.com:

The main point of this article is the fact of a single cache of 400 sarin munitions that would have been lethal if used being bought by CIA.

I chronicle it only because the story that has been burned into the American mind is "Bush lied, people died" -- by literally THOUSANDS of repetitions.

For 80-90% of the people, it CAN'T be changed -- it is part of TP controlling the media and what I consider to be a lack of combativeness on the part of W and company. They were however at war -- as we still are,  and W's concern was after 9-11-2001 focused primarily on keeping America safe.

He made the (probably correct) determination that given the level of media bias and attack mode, putting out information about what was being found would not have helped -- it would have not been covered, and if it was, it would have been covered as somehow "not valid weapons" -- too old, not enough, etc.

Enough time has now passed that as this information comes it the media covers enough of it so that if we get hit with a weapon from Iraq it can be firmly identified as a "failure of the W administration to find the weapons".

Much like the end of the USSR -- the idea of which was firmly considered a "dangerous Reagan fantasy" in the early '80s, suddenly became a fait accompli know by all, impeded by Reagan and brought to completion by Gorby. All those pronouncements from the early '80s? Down the memory hole!

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American Sniper

'American Sniper' Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize | Rolling Stone:

I saw the movie tonight, Solid, entertaining, patriotic, memorable, well done, patriotic,  true to the book and events as known in the real world. Well worth seeing. Highly recommended.

So I did a Google and ran into the lovely linked article.

One needs to remain aware of the Rolling Stone, and  whole sectors of the American "elite". These people, BO included, would fold like wet paper bags in the face of reality if ever forced to face 1/1,000tth of what heroes like Kyle faced, but they remain a clear and present danger. As the article makes plainly clear, their hatred for America and anything good is total, while their faith in their own intellect and smugness may be a lot less real than they want us to believe, it is a pose that their egos demand, so it is dangerous.

One looks at the title of the article and thinks of the genius of Jessie Ventura  sueing Kyle's widow because "he wanted to be treated better at SEAL reunions".  The author of the article seemed to think that making fun of Forrest Gump is an easy target that somehow relates to Sniper -- "Stupid is as stupid does".

The message of Forrest Gump, and indeed the message of Christianity and to some degree Western Civilization is that there is "book smart" and then there is "transcendent intelligence and meaning". "Book smart" is often foolishness that is completely certain that it is genius in it's own mind, confines of the classroom or Rolling Stone, but often falls on very hard times in the real world. In fact, much like Commodus in "Gladiator", the pseudo sophisticated intellect tends to be certain right up to the end that it's malevolent self aggrandizing is actual reality, rather than the figment of it's own imagination that it really is.

Mayor Bloomberg and the entire NYPD turning their backs to him comes to mind. The author of "the too dumb to criticize" article, Michael Moore, and a couple of other "intellectuals" walk into a bar and decide to kick a couple of Navy SEALS asses ... cuz they are REALLY smart!

Sure. No doubt before anything even started the "brilliant ones" bowels, bladders and stomachs would have spilled all contents on the floor from just looking the reality of actual character in the eye. Now, what they would really like to do is find some way to charge the SEALS with some "crime" -- say running afoul of the IRS, and take them down behind their backs.

"Brilliance" often ends up with it's head cut off in an orange jumpsuit if it is not protected by  Sheepdogs of the ilk of Chis Kyle. If such arrogant "brilliance" was forced to actually face either the evil that Kyle faced down in doing his duty, or God forbid, SEALS of the calibre of Kyle, such "brilliance" of the sort of BO, the writer of the column, or the Hollywood "elite:" would grovel on the floor in their own bodily fluids t as opposed to the preening and swagger they try to fake in protected public pronouncements.

The movie has to be hated by the left  because among many other hated by the left aspects, it points out the truth of Al Zarqawi and Al Qaeda in Iraq, and along with the now known WMD, these are facts that MUST  not be exposed to the tender ears of the sheep in the thrall of the mythology of TP. Even worse, it shows the outpouring of emotion and gratitude of thousands of Americans in recognition of service and sacrifice of Chris Kyle in the closing scenes of actual footage surrounding his memorial and funeral.

The "heroes" of the left are guys like Marx, BO, Castro, Bill Ayers, and BO -- "the brilliant". They know they have no hope of receiving the kind of honest respect of decent people like a Chris Kyle, so they hope for dependent masses and fear. Their hope is that they can gain control of massive killing machines on the order of the USSR and Nazi Germany and take out all Sheepdogs like Kyle  -- ideally in some Gulag, or in some torture chamber like those of Saddam and his sons. I suspect that the author of this article would dearly enjoy a nice electrocution session with a SEAL hanging on a meat hook. It would give him a strong sense of "intellectual superiority" -- of the sort all too regularly on display in the world.

Keep the ARs clean and sighted in. So much better to die with your finger on the trigger than at the hands of the elite moral relativists or Islamic zealots of the world.

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WMD, Ebola, Economic Collapse, Global Warming, The Price of Propoganda

Bush Didn’t Lie | National Review Online:

I'm not going to go through the whole titular list here in detail, but propaganda takes many forms and ultimately it always has a very high cost for the people that become anesthetized to the always complicated, uncertain, and messy world of actual data and information. I will return to the specific of WMD.

We tend to think of propaganda in only the most blatant forms -- the old Tariq Aziz "Iraq is winning the war", or USSR claims of superior production, science, medicine, etc. The slightly more subtle forms are even more dangerous because they prevent large masses of people from dealing with a closer model of reality that could allow them to advance, or at least stave off the myriad disasters that result from not dealing with the real world.

When someone says "settled science", "Bush lied, people died", "We won't see Ebola in the US", and a broad range of other simple pronouncements, they are dealing in propaganda -- maybe because they are directly trying to mislead you, maybe because they themselves are under the spell already, or most likely because they have nothing that transcends the very broken and imperfect reality of the real world and DESPERATELY want to believe that "there are experts / power / government / science / ???" that have managed to make this mortal coil into a meaningful and understood reality that they can bank on.

But in their soul, they know it is not so, so they fight those that deal with reality as it is -- messy, largely unknown, meaningless (when taken in only it's own context), unpredictable, capricious, dangerous and totally uncaring.

Paradoxically, nobody can deal with reality as it is without having something that transcends it, so they can achieve enough distance to allow objectivity -- for thousands of years, religion was that mechanism, with various philosophies providing a weak second place, and Christianity being the undisputed ruler as to actually SUCCESSFULLY allowing reality to be managed and often subdued in the service of the transcendent infinite.

In the past few days, more information has been coming out ( http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html) on what was known to widely read conservative readers and readers of this blog for a long time http://bilber99.blogspot.com/2006/06/of-course-iraq-had-wmd.html.

BUT, for propaganda to really fog the brain, it must create a MYTH , which is actually the only way we ever  relate to the world, it has just been given a bad name by the myth-makers on the left scurrying to replace the "myths" of religion, western culture, classical Greece and Rome, science (the ordered universe) with the "models" of today's "sciences" -- humans ONLY operate in the world of model/mythology, as in "a simplified story about the world that is explanatory enough to allow people to operate successfully, but is less than fully "factual" in it's detail".

I deal with computers with a more complete model than "95%+" of the rest of the world because I studied computer science and worked in the field for 30 years which included low level boot operations, assembly language programming and machine language patches. The ESSENCE of successful modern economics is SPECIALIZATION driven by private property and Ricardo's law of comparative advantage. I was able to apply my specialized skill and be paid for it, so 95% of the rest of the world can deal with computers with a MUCH less detailed model (myth).

We all deal with 99.999% of the world at a pretty high level model -- which is all we can do given our limited brains and the overall complexity of the world, but it can trip us up very badly when the models we are presented are architected to be false. The core of the "Bush Lied" statement is the myth (this one based on very very little fact) that W went to war ONLY over "AN ACTIVE WEAPONS PROGRAM" -- the basis of this lie is covered in detail in this article http://ace.mu.nu/archives/352462.php ... essentially we went to war because we KNEW Saddam had WMD, and HE DID ... thousands of rounds of it, not the hundreds that were disclosed. So why didn't the W administration publish this information?

My guess is that the major reason is the same one that caused Reagan to never try to combat the "Reagan sleeps in meetings" myth (he was the boss, if he was tired, he cancels the meeting), or W to combat the "Mission Accomplished" myth (the banner was the ships, not Ws). When the opposition controls 90%+ of the press / education / entertainment storytelling industry and is actively on the job creating their mythology, whatever you say is only going to get people to revisit the media mythology and ignore the facts of the day going forward more than they are already. One of the highest costs of having a party as dominant as TP is that the healthy give and take of real complex information vs one-liner myths is effectively suppressed long before the dominant party reaches total control.

Trying to make the "we told you so" case would not have worked at all for the "50%+" of people that were NOT going to buy that we went to war because we KNEW that Saddam had WMD and we were of course CORRECT -- because he did, everyone in the world knew it because he had used them, and stockpiles of thousands of rounds were and still are being discovered. This is no surprise to those that deal in reality and it is only another cause for myth-making in the case of "news" outlets like the NYTs ... the myth has to be updated a bit to " focus on we ONLY were told that we were going to war because of an ACTIVE WMD program".

People are very unwilling to give up their myths ... to those already in the thrall of "Bush Lied", there are no facts that will change their mind -- not even 100K dead in a US city due to sarin from Saddam's stockpiles, because in their minds, ONLY "active weapons program" sarin would count as having been a reason to invade Iraq!

The current level of media bias, plus the level of public willingness to believe in the "myth of the day" prevents us from taking reasonable actions (like a temporary flight ban) to prevent ebola from killing people in the US, continual tax and spend policies that destroy our economy, and focus on warming that "may happen" in 100 years ... although hasn't happened as predicted in the past 15, rather than energy policies for the present good. The list is much longer -- as we slide to one party rule with a media in lock step, the set of issues over which rational discussion is effectively suppressed becomes ever larger, and our exposure to reality "surprising us" increases proportionally.

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Of Course Iraq Had WMD

Next to the party of Jim Crow and the KKK being re-branded as the party that protects the black man, and Alger Hiss being innocent, the "Where are the WMDs" charge is fast on it's way to going down as to one of those "myths of faith" that is part of the liberal religion.

Anyone with a brain knew Saddam had WMD, because he had used them, and he was documented by everyone to have them. Not long after the war, 30 shells with sarin in them were found, along with 100s of other shells only used for chemicals and equipment to load them. Those stories made it out, mostly in the right-wing press, but the MSM and the Democrats have kept up the "where are the WMDs" drumbeat anyway since it fits with their myth.

Any honest person would admit that the "unbelievable surprise" was that "no WMDs were found". Everyone knew he used them, everyone knew that every intelligence agency in the world had him listed as possessing him. If you hate Bush and think he is the most evil guy ever, it has to be surprising that he wouldn't plant some. After all, if Bush knew Saddam didn't have WMD, he would know they certainly wouldn't be found, so would have to "manufacture some". Not much of a trick for level of evil that most of the left assigns to him, but it never happened. He faked 9-11, then he forgot to plant some WMD? Oh, I forget -- W was both as evil as Hitler and as dumb as a stump!

Now, some Republicans in Congress are starting to force the CIA to release information on the over 500 munitions filled with sarin and other chemicals that have been found to date. Why would the CIA not want information out that shows that their own pre-war intelligence wasn't nearly as bad as it has been made out to be? Your guess may well be as good as mine.

Ever since the "Plame Game" fake "outing" I've been convinced the CIA is more interested in running operations on Bush than on terrorism. Like all big government organizations it is mostly populated by liberal union members with lifetime employment who think that Republicans are some combination of evil and stupid. Having Reagan prove them to be completely wrong on the USSR was no doubt painful.

Having 9-11 happen had to be embarrassing, and no doubt they didn't like having a guy that they saw as mentally inferior working to mold them into shape after they had proven that they couldn't predict even a major event like 9-11 was simply "over their pain tolerance". If they could manage to take Bush down as disgraced, maybe folks would forget the intelligence agencies that completely failed us prior to 9-11.In any case, the following from WSJ is something that the MSM will not doubt not want to talk about.

Saddam's WMD
Why is our intelligence community holding back?

BY PETER HOEKSTRA AND RICK SANTORUM
Monday, June 26, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

On Wednesday, at our request, the director of national intelligence declassified six "key points" from a National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) report on the recovery of chemical munitions in Iraq. The summary was only a small snapshot of the entire report, but even so, it brings new information to the American people. "Since 2003," the summary states, "Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent," which remains "hazardous and potentially lethal." So there are WMDs in Iraq, and they could kill Americans there or all over the world.
This latest information should not be new. It should have been brought to public attention by officials in the intelligence community. Instead, it had to be pried out of them. Mr. Santorum wrote to John DeFreitas, commanding general, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, on April 12, asking to see the report. He wrote, "I am informed that there may well be many more stores of WMDs throughout Iraq," and added, "the people of Pennsylvania and Members of Congress would benefit from reviewing this report." He asked that the "NGIC work with the appropriate entities" to declassify as much of the information as possible.

The senator received no response. On June 5, he wrote again, this time to John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, "concerning captured Iraqi documents, data, media and maps from the regime of Saddam Hussein." He mentioned his disappointment that many captured Iraqi documents had been classified, and that he still had received no response from Gen. DeFreitas. Some 10 days later, still with no response, he shared his dismay with one of us, Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence, who on June 15 wrote to Mr. Negroponte, urging him to declassify the NGIC analytic piece. Mr. Hoekstra was also dismayed because he had not been informed through normal intelligence channels of the existence of this report.

To compound matters, during a call-in briefing with journalists held at noon on June 21, intelligence officials misleadingly said that "on June 19, we received a second request; this time asking that we, in short order--48 hours--declassify the key points, which are sort of the equivalent to key judgments from something like a National Intelligence Estimate, from the assessment." The fault was their own; we had been requesting this information for nine weeks and they had not acted.

On Thursday, Mr. Negroponte's office arranged a press briefing by unnamed intelligence officials to downplay the significance of the report, calling it "not new news" even as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was reiterating the obvious importance of the information: "What has been announced is accurate, that there have been hundreds of canisters or weapons of various types found that either currently have sarin in them or had sarin in them, and sarin is dangerous. And it's dangerous to our forces. . . . They are weapons of mass destruction. They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found. . . . And they are still being found and discovered."
In fact, the public knows relatively little about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Indeed, we do not even know what is known or unknown. Charles Duelfer, former head of the Iraq Survey Group, stated that the ISG had fully evaluated less than 0.25% of the more than 10,000 weapons caches known to exist throughout Iraq. It follows that the American people should be brought up to date frequently on our state of knowledge of this important matter. That is why we asked that the entire document be declassified, minus the exact sources, methods and locations. It is also, in part, why we have fought for the declassification of hundreds of thousands of Saddam-era documents.

The president is the ultimate classifier and declassifier of information, but the entire matter has now been so politicized that, in practice, he is often paralyzed. If he were to order the declassification of a document pointing to the existence of WMDs in Iraq, he would be instantly accused of "cherry picking" and "politicizing intelligence." He may therefore not be inclined to act.

In practice, then, the intelligence community decides what the American public and its elected officials can know and when they will learn it. Sometimes those decisions are made by top officials, while on other occasions they are made by unnamed bureaucrats with friends in the media. People who leak the existence of sensitive intelligence programs like the terrorist surveillance program or financial tracking programs to either damage the administration or help al Qaeda, or perhaps both, are using the release or withholding of documents to advance their political desires, even as they accuse others of manipulating intelligence.

We believe that the decisions of when and what Americans can know about issues of national security should not be made by unelected, unnamed and unaccountable people.

Some officials in the intelligence community withheld the document we requested on WMDs, and somebody is resisting our request to declassify the entire document while briefing journalists in a tendentious manner. We will continue to ask for declassification of this document and the hundreds of thousands of other Saddam-produced documents, and we will also insist on periodic updates on discoveries in Iraq.

This is no small matter. It is not--as a few self-proclaimed experts have declared--a spat over ancient history. It involves life and death for American soldiers on the battlefield, and it involves the ability of the American people to evaluate the actions of their government, and thus to render an objective judgment. The people must have the whole picture, not just a shard of reality dished up by politicized intelligence officers.

Information is a potent weapon in the current war. Al Qaeda uses the Internet very effectively and uses the media as a terrorist tool. If the American public can be deceived by people who withhold basic information, we risk losing the war at home, even if we win it on the battlefield. The debate should focus on the basic question--what, exactly, we need to do to succeed both here and in Iraq. We are dismayed to have learned how many people in our own government are trying to distort that debate.