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st0nedphucker said:
The title of this thread is misleading and its another guardian article lol....

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Starter said:
Wonder how the US public (if they read?!?) will react on this news in light of loss of sons/daughters in Iraq & $87-billion more for nothing, will Bush be booted in 2004?

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Well we can read quite well, especially since we are not all decendents of a bunch of exiled inmates. What news are you talking about by the way? Blix saying they had no weapons? That is easy for him to come out and say now. He also said he thought Saddam was making it seem to the rest of the world that he did.

[quoteProbably not, such lemmings bought the lie Sadamme was Sep 11th involved. 'tards.

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Who told us that? I don't remember anyone saying that to us from the administration.

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I guess Bush will be praying/scheeming for another big terro attack, then he, like that NY Mayor prior Sep 11th, will be popular again. Because it's only so far BS stories like 'Jessica Lynch' can go to pump the flag waving dullards. Man that was a load of shite.

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Speaking of 'tards, that is one of the dumbest things you have said yet. Rudy was a very popular Mayor before 9/11 ever happened. You don't know what you are talking about.

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Worse is the morons on the net who believe the WOT crap when TCP/IP gives foreign sources free of the FOX fair and balanced LMAO & CNN TV bullshit. Dumb arse neo-con fundies. They've butt fucked you with the Patriot Act and you still lovedemGOPs.

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This is a bit incoherent. Again speaking of 'tards.

>>>Well we can read quite well, especially since we are not all decendents of a bunch of exiled inmates.

It must have hurt eh, the stab of truth on the illiteracy in the US. Your big red buttons are so easy to press. Now take this.

The US has a higher illiteracy rate than Australia. Check the stats.

Australian Literacy: 
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 100%
male: 100%
female: 100% (1980 est.) 

That's right, 100% buster LMAO.

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/as.html

V's

US Literacy:
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
female: 97% (1979 est.)
total population: 97%
male: 97%
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/us.html


You'll note US literacy has been falling.

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The scope of illiteracy in this country

In September, 1993, the most detailed portrait ever available on the condition of illiteracy in this nation was released by the U.S. Department of Education. The National Adult Literacy Survey (ALS) evaluated the skills of adults in three areas: prose, document and quantitative proficiency. Results showed:

23% - 23% (40 to 44 million adults) were at Level 1, the lowest of five levels. This group is the Adult Literacy Service's primary target population - those we refer to as functionally illiterate.

25% - 28% (50 million adults) were at the second lowest level. According to Executive Summary, "While their skills were more varied than those of individuals in Level 1, their repertoire was still quite limited."

The literary proficiencies of young adults were found to be somewhat lower, on average, than the proficiencies of young adults who participated in a 1985 study (the National Assessment of Educational Progress.)

The statistics make it clear: illiteracy is on the increase in the United States. The Office of Technology Assessment (OAT), an analytical arm of the U.S. Congress, stated in a 1993 report:


http://www.standard.net.au/~jwilliams/cons2.htm

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Hang your head in shame shakta. That's a shabby show to say the least ol'boy.




Now the convict thing.
Little known in the US (because Americans don't read) but they too were a British convict dumping ground. The Independence War saw to the end of it. But what is of interest is the difference in how convicts in the US fared to that of Australia.

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Convict Systems 1826.America v the English Colonies.

An overview of the system and its uses taken from a newspaper article published in the Colonial Times in the year 1826.
This site created and provided by and, all rights reserved by
?J.Fawcett 2000

Convict System in America v Convict System in the Colonies.

It may not be generally known,that,in America, the Crown servants
[by some designated convicts] not employed by the State,amounting
to several thousands, are let out to contractors for the term of one
year.

Proposals are there received for the employment of any number of them,
in such labour as the contractor may prefer,subject to the regulations
established for the government of the prisons; and persons disposed
to employ them, invariably apply to either the Directors or to the
Warden, or at the prisons; and every information regarding the
prisoners and the work they can perform, with tools belonging to
the State,are readily communicated.
Among this class of people are men of remarkable ingenuity and skill;
and the price at which their time can be let out, makes it an
object worthy of very general consideration. Payment for the labour
of the prisoners is made every quarter, and bonds given for the same.
Thus is appears, that in America those who forfeit their rights as
free men are treated very differently to those either in these Colonies
or in England.

Upon the arrival of prisoners here,[Aust] they are generally assigned
to the services of Settlers, or other respectable inhabitants; and
instead  of working in a state of slavery, as in America, they are
well clothed, and victualled by their employers, and moreover
recieve a compensation in wages for their labour.

If a man is industrious and well disposed to his master, he generally
receives additional encouragement. He throws off the badge of
prison clothing, and appears,literally speaking, the same as a free
man. If he is a good and confidential servant, he is in a few years
rewarded by a ticket of leave, which enables him to work for himself,
in the same manner as those who enjoy freedom. Not so in America; for
if he renders any important services to our Government [and there
are many opportunities for so doing], they are almost sure to
receive a conditional or free pardon.

Upwards of fifty men have experienced this act of clemency even
during the present year; besides as many more in tickets of leave.
This of itself is sufficient to induce the whole class of prisoners
in these Colonies to conduct themselves consistent with their station
in life. IF their services are not rewarded one time, they may be
assured they will not be overlooked at some distant period. It is
the policy of the Government to hold out every possible encouragement
to such of them as evince a feeling to retrieve their former character.
If they could only see this in its true colours, we should seldom
hear of bush-ranging, and its attendant consequences - evil,misery and
death.!  We have been induced to make these observations from the
knowledge we possess on the subject, as regards the difference of the
employment of prisoners in America, in these distant colonies, and on
board the Hulks in England.
Source - CT Sept 1 1826

NB.This article is designed to assist in giving an overview
of the convict system.
All original records should be accessed to confirm any
accounts of the convict system.

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What If We'd Never Gone To War With Iraq?

What if the war on Iraq had never happened? What if America and Britain had stepped up to the brink last March, peered over the edge, only to pull back at the very last moment?

Let's say George Bush had been persuaded to give the United Nations inspectors what they wanted: more time.

The British and American soldiers had been told to stand by; the bombs had stayed in their bays.

How different would our world have been? Whose lives would be better, whose worse? Who would still be here, and who would have gone?

Start at the obvious place: Iraq itself.

That statue of Saddam Hussein in central Baghdad's Paradise Square would still be standing, as tall and imposing as ever - and no one would know that, on the inside, it was completely hollow.

The people of Iraq would still be living under Saddam's murderous tyranny.

Those who dared to speak out would lose their tongues, if not their lives.

But the electricity would still be working, and so would the running water and sewers.

There would be no freedom, no marches in the street, no rallies at the mosques. But there would be order.

Those who kept their heads down and their mouths shut could at least count on life's basic services.

The country would be under dictatorship, but not anarchy.

Iraq's National Museum would still contain its priceless collection of mankind's oldest treasures, remnants from the very birth of civilisation.

No looters would have broken the glass cases and hauled off Baghdad's ancient wonders for sale on the international market.

THE United Nations building in the capital would still be intact, along with the Jordanian Embassy and the Imam Ali shrine at Najaf, one of Islam's holiest sites.

The UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello would still be alive and so would Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim, the leader Iraq's Shi'ites revered more than any other.

The country would not be a magnet for radical Islamist terrorists, said to be flocking from across the Arab world to take shots at the great American infidel: there would be no US occupation to "resist".

Saddam would still be in charge, cracking down on any hint of al-Qaeda activity within his borders - regarding the organisation as a threat to his own rule.

Hans Blix would still be around, irritating his Iraqi hosts with his daily requests to snoop and probe every factory and laboratory in the country.

The Iraqis would bob and weave, of course, but with the threat of force hanging over them, they would co-operate, no matter how grudgingly.

Whatever programme Saddam once had to devise weapons of mass destruction would now be on hold: thanks to Blix, Saddam couldn't organise a fireworks display, let alone build a nuke, without the world knowing about it. His hands would be tied.

The United Nations would declare that the beast of Baghdad was not dead - but firmly locked in his cage.

In the United States, the landscape would look just as different. George Bush would have shocked his right wing by giving in to the people they regard as whining, limp-wristed, European pinkos. By going through the UN, and delaying war, he would have broken the go-it-alone, gung-ho stance that is holy writ for muscular Republicans.

ONE of that faction - say, Congressman Tom "The Hammer" DeLay - would now be preparing to challenge Bush for the Republican nomination in next year's presidential election.

Donald Rumsfeld would have resigned, along with all the civilian hawks that rule America's defence department. The hardline vice-president Dick Cheney would have quit, too, citing "ill health".

The new star of the administration would be the man who always wanted to give diplomacy more time, the Secretary of State Colin Powell.

He would not be planning to quit next year, as he is now, but lining up to serve as vice-president in the next Bush team. Powell and Bush would be hailed as statesmen everywhere but on the American right. French shopkeepers would hang posters of Bush in the window: bravo to the man who stopped war.

In Britain, impersonators would no longer cast the American president as a simpleton with a monkey walk: he would be hailed as a man of reason and restraint, the greatest US leader since John F Kennedy.

Public opinion in the US would be right behind him, with the polls steady rather than sliding, as they are now.

AMERICANS would have been cheered to see the resources now in Iraq directed instead against al-Qaeda.

With Baghdad safely contained, the US would have concentrated all its might on the hunt for Osama bin-Laden. International allies, anxious to reward Washington for its moderation on Iraq, would have given unprecedented levels of co-operation, leading to success after success in the real war on terror - the campaign to find and capture the killers of al-Qaeda.

Who knows, Bin-Laden himself might be behind bars by now.

If he were, Bush's re-election in 2004 would be safe - with none of those daily headlines about US casualties in Iraq to threaten it. And here in Britain, Tony Blair would look a different man. His determination to stay close to Bush would have paid off: he could claim credit for holding back the US president and averting war. In Europe, he would be a lion among leaders, at the heart of the European Union at last.

By now, he would be launching the Yes campaign for a referendum on the euro.

"Trust me," he could say, and no one would laugh in his face.

AFTER all, he had not gone to war on false pretences. Instead, he had stuck to his word. He had always said that he would be reluctant to go to war without UN backing and - since that backing never came - he had kept the troops at home.

He would style himself as a leader strong enough to influence the world's sole superpower, but humble enough to listen to his people.

They had opposed a war on Iraq, and their voices had been heard.

The Conservatives would be itching to brand him weak - "He threatened force and chickened out" - but they would not find it easy.

After all, if Blair had been weak, then so had Bush - and no Tory wants to badmouth a Republican president.

Iain Duncan Smith wouldn't know what to say.

Blair would be cruising towards a third election victory and all IDS could do is watch.

Alastair Campbell would have gone six months ago.

With no Iraq crisis to manage, he could have quit at a time of his choosing.

By now his diaries would be in the shops, just in time to be a big hit at the Labour party conference later this month.

There, Blair would be feted by activists who had learned to fall in love with their leader all over again.

Lord Hutton would be in his study, poring over law books, weighing up grave, but obscure cases - and almost nobody would have heard of him.

DAVID Kelly would have been announced as a senior member of Hans Blix's on-going inspection team in Iraq, applying his phenomenal expertise to the task of keeping Saddam's hands out of the WMD jar.

After that stint, he would have confidently looked forward to his reward. Most people would not know his name, but those who did would know it as Sir David Kelly.

And somewhere in West Yorkshire, 32-year-old Samantha Roberts would be preparing for a weekend at home with her husband, Steven.

The sergeant from the Royal Tank Regiment would not have been killed at Al Zubayr while trying to calm a civilian riot on the fifth day of the conflict in March.

Tomorrow he would be tinkering with the car or maybe watching a game of rugby.

With autumn underway, maybe he and Samantha would be making plans for Christmas.

But that's not how things turned out, is it?

- Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for The Guardian

? owned by or licensed to Trinity Mirror Digital Media Limited 2001.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnew...13372057_method
=full_siteid=50143_headline=-WHAT%2DIF%2DWE%2DD%2DNEVER%
2DGONE%2DTO%2DWAR%2DWITH%2DIRAQ%2D-name_page.html

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And it's all sour grapes ain't it Shakta, your side -- the 'tards -- has made a right pigs ear of it. So get down and lick the world's boots to get the help you need. Read and cry.

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Would You Like Some Freedom
Fries With Your Crow,
Mr. President?
By Gary Kamiya
Salon.com
9-6-3

Six months after spitting in the face of the world, the Bush administration is crawling on its belly before the U.N. If the world doesn't rush to help it, the White House has only itself to blame.

Let me make sure I've got this right. After being insulted, belittled and called irrelevant by the swaggering machos in the Bush administration, the United Nations is now supposed to step forward to supply cannon fodder for America's disastrous Iraq occupation -- while the U.S. continues to run the show?

In other words, the rest of the world is to send its troops to get killed so that a U.S. president it fears and despises can take the credit for an invasion it bitterly opposed.

The rest of the world may be crazy, but it ain't stupid.

The Bush administration's humiliating announcement that it wants the U.N. to bail it out officially confers the title of "debacle" upon the grand Cheney-Rove-Wolfowitz adventure. Not even the world-class chutzpah of this administration can conceal the fact that by turning to the despised world body, it is eating a heaping plate of crow. This spectacle may give Bush-bashers from London to Jakarta a happy jolt of schadenfreude, but it does nothing to help Americans who are stuck with the ugly fallout of the Bush team's ill-conceived, absurdly overoptimistic attempt to redraw the Middle East.

The bitter truth is that everything the administration told us about Iraq has turned out to be false.

The biggest falsehood, of course, concerns the reason we went to war in the first place. President Bush's recent hints that we invaded Iraq to get rid of the evil tyrant Saddam are patently false: The administration's entire prewar argument, until it began to grasp desperately for other explanations on the eve of the invasion, was that Iraq represented an imminent threat to our security. That was, of course, a lie. Iraq never had any connection to al-Qaida (not even the ever-serviceable Tony Blair tried to claim that) and if it had weapons of mass destruction -- which in any case there is no reason to believe it would have used against the U.S. -- none have been found. (In this light, Bush's somewhat peculiar attack on "revisionist historians" appears to have been a Freudian slip.)

However, the Bush administration has succeeded in making its fears come true: Iraq now does harbor enemies who represent an imminent threat to the lives of the 140,000 American servicemen who are hunkered down there. By removing Saddam's dictatorial regime, the U.S. turned a nation that borders Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan and Syria into a lawless, anarchic swamp, open to every jihadi and America-hater who wants to blow up the Yankee infidels who invaded a sovereign Arab state. A G.I. dies almost every day, and 10 more are wounded, and there is no end in sight, and the reasons why are beginning to seem even murkier than the reasons we were in Vietnam.

The Bush administration is probably hoping that the American people won't notice that the invasion created the very problem it was supposed to solve. After all, half of all Americans believe that Iraq was behind 9/11 -- the result of months of the administration's repetitive, hypnotic demonizing of Saddam and total silence about the embarrassingly uncaught Osama bin Laden. Why not go for an even bigger lie and claim that the Iraq nightmare shows that the invasion was needed because now we see just how evil those terrorist ragheads really are?

Perpetual war for perpetual reelection: According to this master strategy, even a losing "war on terror" is a winning hand for Bush, because it makes the world a scarier place and when people are scared they vote for the tough guys. Even if the tough guys don't know what they're doing.

The administration, which in its supreme arrogance regarded postwar planning as beneath it (that's for sissy nation-builders), never acknowledged or even considered that the war and occupation could be messy, long and ruinously expensive -- and it silenced those who tried to warn that it was living in a fool's paradise. When straight-shooting Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, warned that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed to pacify Iraq, the insufferably smug Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld squashed the now-departed officer like a bug: "Any idea that it's several hundred thousand over any sustained period is simply not the case."

Sober contingency analysis could not be allowed to derail the administration's carefully timed new product rollout. The misgivings and warnings of professionals could not be allowed to spoil the grand visions of inspired amateurs embarked on a grand crusade.

Bush said the U.N. must sanction his war on Iraq or "become irrelevant." It did not. Yet today he is crawling on his belly to the supposedly irrelevant U.N., begging it to bail him out of the quagmire he created.

The administration said that America was so omnipotent that it could afford to spit in the face of the rest of the world. Indeed, for the ideologues who run the Bush show, flouting our solo might almost seemed to be a sign of God's special favor. Now, having burned our bridges to all of our allies except Britain, the America ?ber alles crowd is reduced to sputtering in rage as the rest of the world -- surprise! -- declines to rush forward with open checkbooks.

Had the U.S. worked with the U.N. to deal with Iraq, as Bush's considerably more world-wise father did in 1991, we would not be facing this problem. The community of nations would have regarded Iraq as its shared responsibility and stepped forward. But by alienating the world -- and squandering the unparalleled goodwill created by 9/11 -- the Bush administration created a powerful disincentive to even those nations that understand the vital necessity of rebuilding Iraq. The unpleasant truth is that for much of the world, helping this shattered nation, even if understood to be a worthy and necessary goal, now equals lending aid and comfort to an American regime that is perceived as blustering, simplistic, addicted to violence, self-righteous, and dangerously out of control.

In a nobler world, France and Turkey and Germany and Russia would forget all those nasty things that Bush officials (and their mouthpieces in the Murdoch media empire) said about them and send tens of thousands of troops to bail us out. But the real world does not work that way. The "axis of weasels" is now enjoying every minute of it while the Bush regime squirms.

By insisting that any U.N. forces be placed under U.S. control, the Bush administration is trying to save what little face it has left, but also making it that much harder to enlist the help of other nations. Moreover, no one at the United Nations is likely to have forgotten that the bombing that blew up the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad could never have been carried out except in the power vacuum that followed the ouster of Saddam. Had the Bush administration not poured contempt upon the U.N., that fact might not have led to acrimony and finger-pointing -- after all, it is unreasonable to blame the U.S. for that vile deed. But the Bush team is reaping what it has sowed.

To be sure, some kind of deal may yet be worked out. But if the terms of that deal are more niggardly than the Bush administration would like, if much of the world stands on the sidelines and watches the bully twist in Iraq's deadly breeze, it will have only itself to blame.

- Gary Kamiya is Salon's executive editor.

http://www.informationclearinghouse...article4625.htm

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Starter said:
I'd love to take you up on that shakta, I've never backed down in straight fight in my life.

But I'm in Australia and you're in the US. So unless you wish to come over -- seeing you want to blue me -- then by all means, I'm open to meeting you here in Oz.

So is that the best you have shakta? I crushed you intellectually. I smashed to obliteration all your weak paradigms. And I would do that to you physically, if you were here. No love lost.

Alios
Starter. 

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The title of this thread is misleading and its another guardian article lol

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Sorry I just get a little giddy at times 

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Shakta: Fuck the both of you hows that. I am done here. The disengenuous ramblings of you pinko bastards has driven me insane.

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