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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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(4740 previous messages)
lchic
- 08:43pm Oct 7, 2002 EST (#
4741 of 4757) ~~~~ 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
rshow55
- 09:58pm Oct 7, 2002 EST (#
4742 of 4757) 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.
The lead front page story on Sunday was this:
Israel Set to Use New Missile Shield to Counter
Scuds By MICHAEL R. GORDON http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/06/international/middleeast/06MISS.html
Israel is ready to use a missile defense to
protect Tel Aviv and other major population centers if they
come under fire from Iraq.
It includes an excellent interactive feature: Israel’s
Antimissile System.
Impressive as the results of that system are - - the
program illustrates the technical challenges of ballistic
missile defense - especially for longer range missiles, and
with the complications of decoys. The Isreali system might
perhaps lend itself, at moderate cost, to some of the insights
described described in the example of 4533-4547 rshow55
9/25/02 4:38pm . Radars and controls at the heart of the
system, good as they are - might be subject to further
improvement.
I posted references to MD4739-40 rshow55
10/3/02 9:06am and some later postings on a Guardian Talk
thread Psychwarfare, Casablanca -- and terror #330 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/352
Including links to CIA and my security problems,
3774-3779 rshow55
8/17/02 5:58pm
Perhaps some of those security problems have occurred in
the past because I haven't stated clearly enough why I felt I
needed to be careful, and needed to be debriefed. It seems to
me that the reasons for my feeling so ought to be clearer now.
When National Security Adviser Rice wrote this, I believe
she wrote something profound and hopeful. I'm doing the best I
can to help make it true.
" Today, the international community has
the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the
seventeenth century to build a world where great powers
compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war. . .
. . . The United States will build on these common interests
to promote global security. "
" The National Security Strategy of the
United States," http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/20/politics/20STEXT_FULL.html
. page 2.
For that to be true - we need to make decisions based on
correct information .
We also need to make sensible judgements based on what we
know - and ought to know. It is dangerous, and wasteful, for
us to put too much faith in systems that are vulnerable, and
can easily become ineffective.
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