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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 09:14am Oct 3, 2002 EST (# 4740 of 4742)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

I very much appreciate gisterme's hard work on this thread, after some absence, between 5:13 pm yesterday and 3:00 in the morning today.

If gisterme is not Rice, gisterme has many of the same capabilities - including those of both clean and dirty academic administrative discourse.

The analogies between US military policy and patterns of enronation are uncomfortably close. Perhaps some things are coming to a head.

Some of the things gisterme said were outrageous - - big lies - - and it makes sense to deal with those things carefully.

If I'm right about who gisterme is, some politicians know about this thread, and are asking questions. If those questions are sensible and responsible, that means that some things long hidden - sometimes "hidden in plain sight" - are going to be understood and exposed.

Gary Hart is profoundly right that the democrats need a defense policy based on rationality and truth. Republicans need one, too. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/03/opinion/03HART.html

It is in the interest of all Americans of good faith, and all world leaders of responsibility, to establish some key facts and relations on which important matters of world safety, decency, and material prosperity depend.

I believe that this thread, viewed a pretrial discovery - contains a lot of useful material.

Because of format, this thread can't take anything to closure. But patterns discussed here at length, with much Bush administration involvement over many months - could establish a lot, beyond a reasonable doubt, by the standards jury trials take, if people with real power wanted that to happen.

lchic - 08:43pm Oct 7, 2002 EST (# 4741 of 4742)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

The Bush speech as reported nyt today .... yes ... well

That guy needs a speech writer!

~~~~~~~

Here's a Letter to an editor I chanced upon ..

One in ten Iraqis dead or deported

Letter to the Editor

AT the end of the Gulf war in 1991 the Shiites of southern Iraq rose up in rebellion against Saddam to try to shake off the dictatorship under which they had been living.

The uprising was brutally crushed by the Iraqi army and Saddam's nine internal security services. For example, in Amara (near Basra) they made the Shiites, or anyone who looked religious, lie down in the streets and then buried them alive under asphalt.

Some 60,000 to 70,000 people were killed in and around Amara in 1991. During the 1990s, the regime killed about 300,000 Shiites in southern Iraq.

These events, regrettably, were not the only crimes against humanity committed by Saddam.

In the Anfal campaign in the late 1980s, the Iraqi regime destroyed 4000 Kurdish villages in the north of the country. Between 100,000 and 150,000 Kurds were killed, some with poison gas. Around a million more people were sent into internal exile.

Since 1979, Saddam has been directly responsible for the deaths of approximately one million Iraqi citizens and a further one million Iraqi soldiers who died in wars which he instigated against Iran and Kuwait.

Between 1.5 and 2 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and a further 4.5 million Iraqi refugees are scattered across the globe. Altogether, 10 per cent of the Iraqi population has been killed or deported.

These statistics are well known to human rights organisations that have worked inside Iraq but sadly have received little coverage in the world media. Dr Leanne Piggott Lecturer, Middle East Studies The University of Sydney

DURING the Vietnam War, Communist fellow travellers and the anti-war movement claimed the US was only after Vietnam's oil. Note the fabulous wealth Vietnam derives from its oil.

G. Townley

Croydon Park, SA

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/sectionindex2/0,5746,ausletters1^^TEXT,00.html

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