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Feb. 19, 2005 My choice of the word “faulted” in my recent article about the war dead in Iraq was not meant to depict Tom Pain as an “instigator”. I didn’t understand his original comments to constitute an instigation so much as a lack of awareness or comprehension of opposing points of view. Pain goes on to say I was continuing a “reckless bandying of vague numbers without documentation”. I most certainly did provide documentation, such as it was, for all three numbers that I cited as dead in Iraq: 55,000 in 2003; 100,000 in 2004; and 250,000 in 2006. In the informal discussion in the Rebuttal section I perhaps was not clear in distinguishing between Iraqis actually killed directly by US forces and those who were killed in the whole chaotic situation that the US invasion unleashed. I don’t think it makes much difference to the dead. At any rate, I was careful in my article not to weigh in as if I were vouching for these figures. So to say that I was bandying vague numbers without documentation is doubly false. I didn’t bandy the numbers; I quoted them with reservations. And I did provide the documentation, which I repeat here again: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/11/280250.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3962969.stm http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11674.htm Let me be very clear that I am not taking responsibility for the accuracy of the above estimates, but I do consider them in the realm of the possible, while very seriously doubting any estimates coming from the White House. All of Pain’s comments on such things as my having contracted brain fever or brain rot, etc., are out of place, in my opinion, in a serious discussion, and though I could reply in kind, I won’t do so, instead giving Pain the benefit of the doubt by assuming that he is serious despite the frivolous nature of those remarks. Instead of being instructed in the meaning of the word “lie”, let me recall the famous 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address alluding to the attempt by Iraq to purchase uranium in Niger. It might be difficult to establish that George W. Bush knew about the Niger forgeries at the time he delivered his address, but it can be shown that the information was in the public domain by March 7, 2003, two weeks before the invasion or Iraq. So if Bush did not know about it in January, he certainly did know about it by March, but did not recant at all and did not even hesitate to continue with his plans for the invasion, which means he was willing to accept the lie. http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/07/sprj.irq.un.transcript.elbaradei/ Furthermore, before the invasion, it was discovered that part of Downing Street’s dossier, purporting to contain fresh intelligence, was plagiarized from a student’s college thesis written years previously. This intelligence is what Bush relied upon to make his address, and he cannot have not known, before the invasion, that it was false. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/838540/posts Moreover, John Pilger of the Sydney Morning Herald claims that he has video footage of Colin Powell stating in Cairo, Egypt, on February 24, 2001, that Iraq had no WMD. If the American mainstream media want to pretend not to have noticed this bit of information, please don’t tell me that the CIA, the DIA, the OSP and the White House were oblivious of it entirely also. http://sf.indymedia.org/mail.php?id=1647848 In view of these three sources, I say that it is impossible that George W. Bush did not know he was uttering or had uttered a falsehood. I’ve posted these facts in articles time and time again. Using analogies about my mother gang-banging a football team, as Pain sees fit to do, certainly cannot overturn these well-substantiated facts. Bush lied about the Iraq-Niger uranium deal, and that’s all there is to it. Rather than own up to it though he invented this huge stratagem of maintaining that he was the victim of intelligence failures. If the uranium Niger deal was a hoax, how then can it be said that Joseph Wilson was slandering Republicans, when all he did was state his contention that the hoax was a hoax? Pain must consider himself telepathic to assert that I would never suggest that that the leakers of the NSA wiretaps and the European prisons be prosecuted. I have never uttered a syllable on either subject, and I haven’t followed those issues at all. I’m not in the least interested in them either. This is a recurrent theme in Pain's articles. He has a tendency to place people in categories that he supposes mistakenly are valid. Perhaps, have conceived the notion that I am a liberal or a Democrat, because of my attitude against the war in Iraq, he supposes that I subscribe to a whole roster of tenets that he imagines acccompany that attitude. In fact, I have not taken a position on any other issues concerning the Federal Government except the Iraqi War and, very slightly, religion in the schools. I can name several writers who call themselves conservatives who are opposed to the war: Pat Buchanan, Joseph Sobran, Charley Reese, Justin Raimondo, Eric Margolis, etc. So Pain's generalizations are meaningless. He should attempt to answer the arguments presented rather than the ones he intuits are in somebody's mind. I’m afraid that Pain is better versed at exaggerated vituperation than at analysis of the facts of the matter. I conclude that if Bush could lie so glibly in seeking to justify an unjustifiable war, which I consider a serious misdeed, I would be foolish to accept his estimates on the war dead without at least considering other estimates. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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