The number of people still prepared to defend the Iraq War in public is tiny. The interesting thing is the very strong correlation between those people, and those prepared to pretend to give credence to the farcical sexual allegations about Julian Assange. Zoe Williams Guardian piece about what a jolly good chap Blair is I find breathtaking. War crimes like Blair’s result in terrible anguish for millions. I am prepared for purposes of argument to believe that Williams’ anguish for female victims of crime is genuine; why she can’t extend that to the tens of thousands of women who were raped because of Blair’s Iraq War, or had the still worse agony of seeing their children killed and mutilated I don’t know. Nick Cohen is just very, very sad. I just hold up these two in the hope that those deceived by feminist political correctness into following their lead against Assange will see to what they are subscribing.
Rather a side issue, but even if we accept Zoe Williams view that dead Iraqi children don’t matter, she appears not to have noticed that Blair introduced tuition fees, academies, kick-started NHS privatization, allowed the banksters’ bonanza leading to worldwide economic crash and oversaw the greatest widening of the gap between rich and poor in British history.
“Freedom is a delusional lie is it?”
When it’s anything to do with that CIA front, yes.
Kempe
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Re: Amnesty International.
The ‘trustworthy issue’ revolves around whether you can trust an organisation which says it doesn’t accept donations from governments, but does.
“If we’re questioning the reliability of sources I not that the author of a Youtube video posted earlier, Ken O’Keefe, is a well known conspiracy fruitloop and associate of David Icke!”
Posted by who? Not me.
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“Libya was a democracy in name only” .
“That’s just another opinion.”
No it’s an established fact.”
Who has established this fact? Not you. You can’t just keep saying that hoping repetition will make it true. Libya’s method of governance was direct democracy.
Direct democracy is a form of democracy in which people decide policy initiatives directly, as opposed to a representative democracy in which people vote for representatives who then decide policy initiatives. …
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Democracy
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RE: child mortality figures
“So you admit there’s no evidence to support your claim. The country has just fought a civil war so figures might dip for a year or two before getting back to normal. That’s my prediction for what it’s worth.”
I ‘admitted it’ in my initial post on the subject. Here it is again: “The situation is now so chaotic that no figures are available. But it is certain that mortality rates will have risen dramatically. Already, parts of Libya are being compared to Iraq’s Fallujah for deformed baby rates due to Depleted Uranium.”
It was part of my point that Libya has been reduced to such chaos that statistics are no longer available.So, you think the figures will be back to normal in a couple of years. That’s ridiculous. You think this isn’t going to affect the figures? …
http://nuclear-news.net/2014/03/01/birth-deformities-cancers-in-libya-as-result-of-depleted-uranium-weapons/
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“Iraq was very different. Libya is not subject to occupation by foreign military forces and doesn’t suffer from the internal divisions that are causing the problems in Iraq. I’ve always said the invasion of Iraq was a grave error and my opinion hasn’t changed.”
You didn’t answer the question. Do you believe the average Iraqi has benefited from Western intervention?”
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Re: links to censorship and fear of execution for political activity.
I asked for ‘reliable sources’. Yours are propaganda outlets, used to justify the NATO bloodbath in Libya. For example they repeatedly call Gaddafi a dictator.
Gaddafi wasn’t a dictator:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator
“A dictator is a ruler who does not rule through democratic means. …”
As established above, Libya was a democracy. Your sources’ repeated use of the term ‘dictator’ is incorrect and proof that they put propaganda before truth. Here are short quotes from your links:
“After the fall of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, Libya has seen a flourishing of new media outlets and NGOs.”
and
“Like most countries that are ruled by a dictator free speech is not allowed in Libya”
and
“A telling example of just how much of a threat the internet can be to a dictator is”
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Unless you reply with anything too outrageous to ignore (a distinct possibility) I’ll leave this discussion there. We aren’t going to agree, but thank you for discussing it with me. We’ve each set out our stall. I leave it to any passing observers to judge who made the more plausible case.
Kempe; “Freedom is a delusional lie is it?”
Do you always have difficulty following points in an exchange ?!
The lies I referred to are the ones that “Humanitarian Bombers” like yourself, keep repeating to yourselves in complete denial of reality; there is no “freedom” in either “liberated” Libya or Iraq; to claim that there is simply willful ignorance or plain deceit, that entails refusing to acknowledge the hideously grotesque reality; try to get an overall balance view by looking up the state of “freedom” iro political, religious, press, human rights, & women’s, etc, etc in either country now, otherwise it’s impossible to have a meaningful debate with somebody who is so uniformed about the subject being discussed; to get you started, here’s a few random links that Google provided when I enquire about “political freedom in Libya;
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/16219/libya%E2%80%99s-revolution-will-not-stop-until-we-have-fre
http://www.amnesty.org/en/for-media/press-releases/libya-politicians-face-death-penalty-over-blasphemous-cartoon-2014-02-27
https://en.rsf.org/libye-freedom-of-information-in-jeopardy-30-01-2014,45805.html
http://www.religionnews.com/2014/01/10/christians-libya-cast-anxious-eye-religious-freedom/
“You’d scream blue murder if you were blocked from Youtube”
Now you go from being unbelievably uninformed to ludicrously obscene; this is your answer to all the factors that I listed in my previous reply, and how right I was to state that “they don’t count” ; don’t you even think through what you write ? Are you really saying that I, or anybody for that matter, , would think that internet access has any value, or even any meaning, after having suffered the carnage, & the failed state miserly & violence that is now blighting the lives of the Libyans or Iraqis ?
I’m glad that you tried to support your pov with a link, because it neatly illustrated what people like you, who are so detached from reality, are forced to do; they ignore the overwhelming acknowledge & accepted reality, and seek out an agenda driven pov that fits into their counter-factual world view; so when your link is examined, we find surprise, surprise, that it’s a US Government funded NGO, that it specializes in meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign nations, that it seeks to engineer the overthrows of what they, ie the US, consider “un-democratic governments”, that it was selected by the State Department to receive funding for ‘clandestine activities’ inside Iran, that irony of present ironies, in 2004 it channeled US funds in Ukraine to aid the then presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko ! Yet there’s more, and directly concerning this Blog;
“The executive director of Freedom House, a Washington-based organization that monitors political rights and civil liberties, tells him in 2003 that the group has decided to back off from its efforts to spotlight human rights abuses in Uzbekistan. The shift in policy occurred, she explains, because some Republican board members (in Murray’s words) “expressed concern that Freedom House was failing to keep in sight the need to promote freedom in the widest sense, by giving full support to U.S. and coalition forces”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/books/review/McKelvey2-t.html?_r=0
Here’s one i made up Earlier….
But thing is you just can’t make this stuff up… FFS
Security Council members and other countries alike should express support for a referral of the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC). They should impress on reluctant Council members, in particular Russia and China, the urgency of taking up the issue of accountability for crimes committed by all sides.
“For victims in Syria who have known nothing but suffering, despair and abandonment, the ICC would open up the hope of justice and redress,” said Richard Dicker, international justice director at Human Rights Watch. “It would also send a warning to those responsible for grave crimes on all sides that their day in court may be coming.”
one can get fed up fighting with these Cnts…But not yet
http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/04/14/un-security-council-support-justice-syria
Macky, if the internet is so unimportant why do oppressive regimes go to such great lengths to prevent their citizens having full access to it?
As far as the conditions in Libya and Iraq are concerned might I quote something you said about Russia?
” Despite its long history, Russia is at an early stage of development in economic terms and new systems and the embeddedness of them takes time. “
” We’ve each set out our stall. I leave it to any passing observers to judge who made the more plausible case. ”
Indeed.
Kempe; “Macky, if the internet is so unimportant why do oppressive regimes go to such great lengths to prevent their citizens having full access to it?”
You really do have a problem following a debate; I did not say that the internet per se was unimportant, but that for the newly “liberated” Libyans & Iraqis, whose countries have been bombed & set-back decades, whose entire civil & commercial infrastructure has been destroyed, who find themselves struggling to survive among the daily carnage of the resulting “Humanitarian” aftermath, etc, etc, that internet access a) would not seem to be on their list of concerns at all, b) but even if it was top of their lists, to try to argue that having internet access in any way mitigates what they had to suffer, and still are suffering, is truly beyond surreal.
“As far as the conditions in Libya and Iraq are concerned might I quote something you said about Russia?”
I would be most grateful that if you are going to quote me on something that I said, you don’t attribute other people’s words as my own, for I have no idea where you got that quote from, but I do know that it is something I have not stated.
“I have no idea where you got that quote from ”
Apologies, it was Herbie on the “UK Moves..” thread.
Good point though.
A Node re St Gaddafi
“Unless you reply with anything too outrageous to ignore (a distinct possibility) I’ll leave this discussion there. We aren’t going to agree, but thank you for discussing it with me. We’ve each set out our stall. I leave it to any passing observers to judge who made the more plausible case.”
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My vote goes to Kempe
Macky squeals
“Kempe; “Freedom is a delusional lie is it?”
Do you always have difficulty following points in an exchange ?!”
____________________
That’s rather rich, I must say, coming from someone once characterised by the honest Dreoilin as “not the sharpest blade in the drawer”.
And while we’re at it, Kempe’s writing is streets ahead of yours.
A Node
“Libya’s method of governance was direct democracy.
Direct democracy is a form of democracy in which people decide policy initiatives directly, as opposed to a representative democracy in which people vote for representatives who then decide policy initiatives. …”
_________________
Interesting. I should like to learn more from the horse’s mouth. So could you perhaps list a few of the policy initiatives which were decided by the people directly? Just a handful would do, together with back-up from reliable sources.
Thanks.
A Node
Further to my question just above: Gaddafi’s sending lots of aid in the form of oil and money to the lovely Idi Amin, was that one of the policy initiatives decided by the people?
You can almost feel the “Freedom” the Irqais are now enjoying; but no mention of the widespread & joyful use of the internet, funny that;
http://news.yahoo.com/once-arab-model-baghdad-now-worlds-worst-city-171513551.html
It’s the synchronicity, Macky.
Ben; “It’s the synchronicity, Macky”
Just as well we didn’t post at the exact same time, otherwise it will be a new CT, you being me or I being you or we being both !! 😀