Rebane's Ruminations
September 2008
S M T W T F S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
282930  

ARCHIVES


OUR LINKS


YubaNet
White House Blog
Watts Up With That?
The Union
Sierra Thread
RL “Bob” Crabb
Barry Pruett Blog

George Rebane

Bush lied about Saddam’s nuclear program?  Well, according to the Associated Press, reported by no less liberal medium than MSNBC on 5 July 2008, Bush didn’t lie.  It turns out that 550 metric tons of Yellowcake_2 uranium bearing ‘yellowcake’ – you know, the stuff that Iran is now spinning the bejeezus out of to get weapons grade uranium – was confiscated by US troops in 2003 and subsequently shipped secretly to Canada.  It seems that it was Joe Wilson who lied about what he learned in Niger about Iraq’s interest in purchasing more yellowcake.  You can see the original post here.  But the point now is that this should have resulted in published media confessions of error here and in Europe – nothing.  This reminds me of Hillary’s Rose law firm billing records that mysteriously disappeared when needed by the special prosecutor working on the Clintons Arkansas sleaze case.  Then after the statute of limitation had run, the records mysteriously reappeared – according to Hillary – on a table in the middle of the presidential quarters in the White House.  Again, the ‘fair and balanced’ mainstream media noted it and dropped it.  My liberal friends have seen nothing special about such goings on and continue to maintain that ‘on the whole’ the MSM drives pretty much down the center of the road.

The birthdays of Danny Pearl and Samar Kuntar reflect two sides of the human condition in the near and mid east.  Danny was murdered by Islamists for the crime of being a Jew while attempting to bring understanding to peoples separated by decades of hate and war.  Samar Kuntar is the unrepentant Jpearl_3 Arab psychopath and child-killer recently released by the Israelis whose gala birthday celebration in Lebanon was applauded and broadcast by Al-Jazeera.  Kuntar publicly stated that he intends to get back to his bloody business as soon as possible.  In the meanwhile Danny Pearl’s birthday has been celebrated by music festivals bringing together Arab and Jew to seek an alternative to the last six decades of conflict.  My friend Judea Pearl (Danny’s father and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation pictured here) recently pointed out to me that Al-Jazeera is also unrepentant in its celebration of the murderer’s methods and message.  Such broadcasts go out daily to 50 million Arabs who in the large wholly agree with and abet the anti-Israeli and anti-western efforts of the Muslim terrorists.  And worse, they are picked up and reinforced by our own resident anti-Americans.  For more detail about both of these birthdays please read here and here.

Toxic debt digested by taxpayers.  And finally, an email from friend, investor, and correspondent Tony Medler who sent me the following which I append with his permission.  “The current outrage over short sales and the concept that they must be banned to protect failing companies reminds of the history laid out in the Government’s management of Yellowstone Park.  They decided to eradicate all the wolves to protect the moose.  The moose population grew to extinction and, as a side benefit, all the beavers disappeared.  There should be a cartoon showing Bush and his cohorts gathered around making all these new regulations to “fix” the current problems.  On the horizon is a huge bank of black clouds with the title “unintended consequences”.  Free markets may cause pain at some times as excesses are corrected, but the Soviet Union showed what happens with total regulation.”

      

Posted in , ,

2 responses to “Ruminations – 20sep08”

  1. Inconvenient Facts Avatar
    Inconvenient Facts

    The reason that the media ignored the yellowcake confiscation is that it doesn’t prove what you claim it proves.
    Bush’s 2002 claim was that “The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” He said in that same speech
    (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html) that “Before being barred from Iraq in 1998, the International Atomic
    Energy Agency dismantled extensive nuclear weapons-related facilities, including three uranium enrichment sites.” So Bush himself
    acknowledged that there were already nuclear facilities in the country that had been controlled and accounted for. The accounted-for
    material is not evidence of anything new.
    And what does the link you yourself provided say?
    “Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which
    had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after
    1991, the official said.

    They removed yellowcake from the country that had already been known about, locked away and accounted for long before the alleged “Nigeria
    trip.” That’s why there’s no confession of error: there’s no error to correct.

    Like

  2. George Rebane Avatar
    George Rebane

    Thank you for the clarification. In the same vein though, did not the continued possession of 550 tons of the precursor for WMD by a regime that had a continuous record and unrepentant intent to make nuclear weapons constitute a causus belli against a regime that had already attacked its neighbors? And the US Army’s ongoing concern that the stuff would find its way to more concealed manufactories existed after the invasion; did such concern not exist in spades before we got control of it? It’s hard to believe that IAEA’s “accounting for” anything alleviates anyone’s original concern or the existential danger. IAEA has similarly accounted for thousands of centrifuges in Iran to no one’s peace of mind. And finally,that the yellowcake was removed in great secrecy gave summary testimony that Iraq possessed dangerous WMD materials in 2003 which in the wrong hands are still dangerous in 2008.

    Like

Leave a comment