Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

By the way, the USA had no issues with Iraq gassing the Iranians, or the Kurds - then were even keeping the Iraqis in supply with agents and dual use technology up until the first gulf war well after 88'.

Shameful and duplicitous don't you think?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/25/secret_cia_files_prove_america_helped_saddam_as_he_gassed_iran

 44Ronin wrote:

 whembly wrote:


Hardly a WMD? feth you say...

https://www.google.com/search?q=effects+of+mustard+gas+kurds&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=HiSPU7qwBNKNyAThkoKIDQ&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ&biw=1239&bih=747

Seems very WMD-y to me... o.O

Do we need this nonsense?

Sarin, Tabun, VX. They used nerve agents.

What nonsense? You're claiming the Mustard Gas isn't WMD.

Saddam Huessain is known for his use of it on the Kurds in the late 90's.

Besides...
WMD were found in Iraq. But, you don't hear about it because it didn't fit the whole narrative that Bush lied so that he can get his "cowboy" fix. To be fair, this won't ever get resolved until those classified documents are declassified in early 2020.... hopefully.

Wait? Saddam created Mustard Gas. Ronin denies or seems to think its not a WMD. Then Ronin show US helping Saddam crank up WMD production. Also Ronin named some nerve agents. Also Ronin didn't know "WMD" per say.

Mention Mustard Gas being WMD due to it being a Irritant Gas.
Did not mention though about persistent and non-persistent types
Might as well bring in another horror story of a chemical call "Blood Agents" which will eat through a pro-mask filter in like an hour
Let's not forget Anthrax. I hate the inoculation of that series but not really good protection against the "lets radiate the anthrax with this dose of rads and see what we get" type of spore
Have seen someone inject them self with atropine and commence a "kicking chicken"

Also another weapon of mass destruction which was use "recently" being a pressure cooker was the Boston Bomber.


morning all

http://www.mintpressnews.com/about-mint-press-news/

That site is totally legit

Tracy Lee and Katie Lentsch are a bit good looking

I'll just leave this here...

https://news.vice.com/article/guantanamo-prisoners-get-to-play-video-games-in-a-recliner-while-being-force-fed?utm_source=vicenewsfb

Oh the inhumanity!

Detainees can choose from hundreds of video games and movies, said Milton, the Guantanamo librarian who doesn't give out his last name. They can watch Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland or play Portal 2. But, say, Call of Duty: Ghosts isn't available — Milton said the library doesn't carry violent video games or movies.

I'm shocked. WTH.

Well to be fair, do terrorists want to play as US troops who are killing terrorists

Question though can they be good at the game? I hate having team mates who cannot play

Yeah, being allowed to play computer games in a comfy chair totally makes up for being held for years on end without trial. I dunno why anyone would complain.

 Jihadin wrote:
Question though can they be good at the game? I hate having team mates who cannot play

I think the greatest torture we could ever subject our detainees to is one many of us subject ourselves too willingly; MOBAs. Give them LoL accounts and watch them drown in their own tears.

 Da Boss wrote:
Yeah, being allowed to play computer games in a comfy chair totally makes up for being held for years on end without trial. I dunno why anyone would complain.

You're deflecting*... this is the image that some believe Gitmo has:



*notwithstanding regarding indefinite detention.

Woah, I'm deflecting?
Jeez!

 Da Boss wrote:
Woah, I'm deflecting?
Jeez!

I hear you recently found the Mirror Shield in the Spirit Temple

That's after he got the Blessing from the Lady right?

How many of the detainee have countries willing to take them back I wonder..

 Jihadin wrote:
That's after he got the Blessing from the Lady right?

How many of the detainee have countries willing to take them back I wonder..

Who wouldn't want to take back someone who may pose a serious threat to national security, and who may turn on his own country if they are on good terms with the US?

 44Ronin wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
You make it to easy Ronin.

50 deployed Al-Samoud 2 missiles
Various equipment, including vehicles, engines and warheads, related to the AS2 missiles
2 large propellant casting chambers
14 155 mm shells filled with mustard gas, the mustard gas totaling approximately 49 litres and still at high purity
Approximately 500 ml of thiodiglycol
Some 122 mm chemical warheads
Some chemical equipment
224.6 kg of expired growth media

I also remember the two chamber 155/158mm two chamber shells they used thinking they were HE shells that were used as IED's. Talk about when sucking day in 130 heat in MOPP4

Pretty simple as an Interviewer to know by looking. Now, who remembers the convoy's that Iraq had going in to Syria before we invaded

I really got to laugh when you list missiles with a range of 180km. No really a "world threat".

Mustard gas..... hardly a WMD. You list thiodiglycol, which is simply a chemical used in mustard gas.

So..yeah 180km range missiles and some mustard gas....

Holy crap, who did you "interview" that said mustard gas wasn't a WMD?

 Jihadin wrote:
Wait? Saddam created Mustard Gas. Ronin denies or seems to think its not a WMD. Then Ronin show US helping Saddam crank up WMD production. Also Ronin named some nerve agents. Also Ronin didn't know "WMD" per say.

And all the found weapons were pre91 stock. Contrary to the pretext for war. As I said, it was a war of aggression with little justification.

Let's not forget Anthrax. I hate the inoculation of that series but not really good protection against the "lets radiate the anthrax with this dose of rads and see what we get" type of spore
Have seen someone inject them self with atropine and commence a "kicking chicken"

Anthrax, another scam:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/15/anthrax-iraq

We can see rums problem, reaction solution at play:

Even if our given pretext for invading Iraq was wrong, it was still the right thing to do.

If anything, complain that we didn't use any of the laundry list of "legitimate" reasons for invasion.

Relapse wrote:

 44Ronin wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
You make it to easy Ronin.

50 deployed Al-Samoud 2 missiles
Various equipment, including vehicles, engines and warheads, related to the AS2 missiles
2 large propellant casting chambers
14 155 mm shells filled with mustard gas, the mustard gas totaling approximately 49 litres and still at high purity
Approximately 500 ml of thiodiglycol
Some 122 mm chemical warheads
Some chemical equipment
224.6 kg of expired growth media

I also remember the two chamber 155/158mm two chamber shells they used thinking they were HE shells that were used as IED's. Talk about when sucking day in 130 heat in MOPP4

Pretty simple as an Interviewer to know by looking. Now, who remembers the convoy's that Iraq had going in to Syria before we invaded

I really got to laugh when you list missiles with a range of 180km. No really a "world threat".

Mustard gas..... hardly a WMD. You list thiodiglycol, which is simply a chemical used in mustard gas.

So..yeah 180km range missiles and some mustard gas....

Holy crap, who did you "interview" that said mustard gas wasn't a WMD?

Holy crap, order a dictionary look up the word hardly. Basic understanding of the language that we communicate is a good thing. If you can't understand english, let alone posts, stop trying to stawman.

As I said decaying pre 91 mustard stocks and a bunch of unfilled 180km missiles are hardly a world threat.

The 155mm shells? It's enough trouble flying them across the border without your neighbours responding in kind.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Jihadin wrote:
Question though can they be good at the game? I hate having team mates who cannot play

I think the greatest torture we could ever subject our detainees to is one many of us subject ourselves too willingly; MOBAs. Give them LoL accounts and watch them drown in their own tears.

Holy fething gak that's amazing.

Wow Ronin Does your fellow Aussie to not think Mustard Gas is not a WMD. You totally lack a understanding of tactical and strategic delivery? If you had interview whatshisname like you said you did. You know the one that had "George" standing in same room watching the guy getting interrogated. Oh wait. The AISO name "George" cannot be named due to security reasons. That you would at least delve into "WMD" and learn what it entails. Or did you lie about "interviewing"?

Does your fellow Aussie's also think the only thing qualify as a WMD is a nuclear bomb? What are they teaching over there

 Jihadin wrote:
Wow Ronin Does your fellow Aussie to not think Mustard Gas is not a WMD.

What are you trying to type here?

 Jihadin wrote:
If you had interview whatshisname like you said you did. You know the one that had "George" standing in same room watching the guy getting interrogated. Oh wait. The AISO name "George" cannot be named due to security reasons.

What are you trying to type here/what point are you trying to make?

 Jihadin wrote:
Does your fellow Aussie's also think the only thing qualify as a WMD is a nuclear bomb? What are they teaching over there

No, the definition of WMD is understood by and large down here, at least in the circles of people that I know.

Seriously Jihadin, your posts are about 50% actual sentences, 50% poor grammar and garbled English. I want to read what you write, but it's damn hard to.

Not a Grammar King

Ronin does not think Mustard Gas is a WMD, being its an irritant chemical. To him, since it has a small foot print of an area of effect and it does not kill out right like Sarin gas its not really a WMD

Ronin said he interview Habib but pulled a Baron Veigh on a few of us. He knows the subject overview but does not know material within the subject

 LordofHats wrote:
It's not so much that I advocate ignoring treaties as we please so much as recognize that a treaty is just a piece of paper. You can break it on a whim, and there are no immediate consequences unless your on the wrong side of someone with a lot more clout than you. The US' position is such that it can not only ignore treaties as it pleases, but is able to get other countries to back it ignoring treaties.

I'm not commenting on that being right, merely that it is what it is. That's how countries act when they're in a position to do it. Treaties don't get followed because anyone has to follow them, they're followed because it's generally beneficial to follow them rather than ignore them.

And I'm saying the ability of the US to ignore international obligations is way overstated. Being the biggest economy with the biggest military gives scope to rule lawyer your way of obligations and reduces the consequences of breaches, but it doesn't mean there's no consequence for doing so.

You are still dependent on international trade for much of your wealth, and on international law to protect your investments overseas. If you were to act as if international law meant nothing, you would destabilise international trade and remove protections from your overseas investments, and that would have serious economic consequences.

What I am saying is that to the extent that the US enforces and follows international law, it does so not because it is acting nice, but because international law is extremely important to US wealth and prosperity.

The unbinding nature of the UN, imo, turns many of its bodies into a bunch of talking heads, which is basically just normal diplomacy conveniently located in a single building.

Sort of. Talking purely about the General Assembly, the measure has always been how much countries will limit themselves to the UN resolutions, which in turn depends on how much the major countries (the permanent SC members plus Japan and Germany) will limit themselves purely to what they can get through the SC.

And that's ebbed and flowed, especially with regards to the US, based on how much the US can get its agenda through the UN, and also on the politics of the US at the time.

Right now it's at a bit of a low, in part due to US weirdness over Israel, but mostly because of that whole Iraq mess. But there's still a huge advantage to being able to say 'what we want to do is legal and authorised by the UN' so there's no reason to think the current low point will last forever.

The WHO is one of the few bodies attached to the UN that actually works (more or less) Compare it to the International Court of Justice, which basically just exists for a bunch of countries to gang up on another country over some issue while ignoring bigger ones. Or the Human Rights Council, a body that seemingly only exists to condemn a single nation (Israel) for human rights violations, while rarely taking any other incidents (including genocide) very seriously. It's very structure basically prevents any progress on any issue ever being made (unless your Israel, and occasionally, Sri Lanka but no one likes them anyway).

Actually there's a whole bunch of UN bodies that just go about doing the job of processing and organizing world affairs. It's just that we don't talk about those bodies, because who in the hell wants to talk about the body that sets universal standards for aircraft communication, or the standards for health and safety on deep ocean freight ships.

We, quite rightly, debate the more controversial elements, like the General Assembly and the ICJ. But in doing so, most people mistakenly think they make up most, or even all of the UN. Actually most of the UN is involved in lots of boring stuff, like setting up international standards and tracking global health and food trends.

The credibility of the UN isn't that far off from the credibility of the Nobel Prize committees for me. Some of them are okay and mostly work, but as a body I find it mostly ineffective for anything other than grand standing. A problem unlikely to be resolved since the powers that be seem to prefer it that way.

This is basically the same issue. No-one outside of physics hardly covers who won the prize, because it'll be about stuff most all of us can't even pretend to understand. Instead we focus on the prizes that are tied to politics, mostly the Peace Prize, but also to a small extent the Economics prize (and even there we confuse the politics of the economist with the technical merits of his work).

And so we end up thinking the Nobel prize is all political and bad, when it goes about awarding most of its prizes without any political involvement at all (well, there's politics, but it's university style people politics, not right wing left wing stuff).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 whembly wrote:
What nonsense? You're claiming the Mustard Gas isn't WMD.

You know, there was a time when WMS refers to weapons of actual mass destruction. You know, nuclear weapons. Weapons that could destroy cities.

The Bush administration expanded that definition to include chemical and biological weapons in order to justify its planned invasion of Iraq.

So scoffing at the presence of some mustard gas as a justification for the invasion is pretty much the only sensible conclusion.

WMD were found in Iraq. But, you don't hear about it because it didn't fit the whole narrative that Bush lied so that he can get his "cowboy" fix. To be fair, this won't ever get resolved until those classified documents are declassified in early 2020.... hopefully.

No, it was heard about, and laughed at because it was silly. The idea that a handful of chemical weapons would be enough to justify invasion of another country is quite ridiculous.

There isn't a country on Earth that doesn't hold 1,000 times the killing power simply in conventional high explosive. The idea that such pitiful amount of chemical weapons would be deemed a threat to justify invading a country just has no sensible basis at all.

There was a time a Claymore mine was consider a Anti Personnel mine but by today's standard its a WMD on how it is used

This is basically the same issue. No-one outside of physics hardly covers who won the prize, because it'll be about stuff most all of us can't even pretend to understand. Instead we focus on the prizes that are tied to politics, mostly the Peace Prize, but also to a small extent the Economics prize (and even there we confuse the politics of the economist with the technical merits of his work).

And so we end up thinking the Nobel prize is all political and bad, when it goes about awarding most of its prizes without any political involvement at all (well, there's politics, but it's university style people politics, not right wing left wing stuff).

The Literature and the Physics prize have both been criticized for several decades (especially the literature prize) for being awarded to people for reasons other than their work in their fields, the most famous example being the two committee members who gave themselves the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not ever prize winner is picked for political reasons, but the credibility of several of the prize committees is shotty because they're not even good at hiding it when they pick someone for other reasons (like when the picked a poorly known and mediocre author in China simply because he was a dissident against the Chinese government).

 Jihadin wrote:
There was a time a Claymore mine was consider a Anti Personnel mine but by today's standard its a WMD on how it is used

Maybe in unpatched Black Ops, but not real life.

I mean, the use of land mines has been compared to the use of WMDs, but that primarily focuses on the kind you bury and is an analogy rather than an assignment to the category; at least for the most part.

 Jihadin wrote:
Does your fellow Aussie's also think the only thing qualify as a WMD is a nuclear bomb? What are they teaching over there

The actual use of the term


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Jihadin wrote:
There was a time a Claymore mine was consider a Anti Personnel mine but by today's standard its a WMD on how it is used

That wouldn't surprise me

The term WMD is fast becoming the new 'assault weapon'.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LordofHats wrote:
The Literature and the Physics prize have both been criticized for several decades (especially the literature prize) for being awarded to people for reasons other than their work in their fields, the most famous example being the two committee members who gave themselves the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not ever prize winner is picked for political reasons, but the credibility of several of the prize committees is shotty because they're not even good at hiding it when they pick someone for other reasons (like when the picked a poorly known and mediocre author in China simply because he was a dissident against the Chinese government).

Fair point, the desire to send a political message flows in to other prizes as well. But then you could say the same about most any prize, the Booker has its favourites too (what's that, you're an Indian who's written a book about magical realism, please take all our Booker).

 sebster wrote:

Actually there's a whole bunch of UN bodies that just go about doing the job of processing and organizing world affairs. It's just that we don't talk about those bodies, because who in the hell wants to talk about the body that sets universal standards for aircraft communication, or the standards for health and safety on deep ocean freight ships.

Or any governing body that is competent.

Those are headlines reserved for media outlets like The Onion.