Iranian leader's opening rant...sounded like a JW

by restrangled 60 Replies latest jw friends

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  steve2

  Americans laughing at Ahmadinejad serves one useful purpose: It may take their minds of their own power-hungry but dimwitted president, Bush jnr. Americans are fed a daily diet of anti-Iranian news, very much like cultists are fed a biased diet that serves the purposes of cult leaders.

  During the Iraqui-Iranian conflicts of the 1980s, American forces turned a blind eye to Hussein's use of chemical warfare against innocent Iranians. Strange that Americans could have drawn world attention to Hussein's monstrosities against neighbouring people but kept quiet...until they were looking for reasons to topple Hussein when the political stage had changed

  Americans need to laugh loud and hard about Iranian rants because if they don't, they might actually begin to see through the mental fog that Bush and his ilk specialise in.
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  nvrgnbk

  Through the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, as first one side and then the other gained the upper hand, the Reagan administration was officially neutral but behind the scenes tilted from one side to the other. When Iran appeared to be winning in 1982, Reagan and his advisers made a fateful decision to secretly supply Saddam's military, including permitting shipments of dual-use technology that Iraq then used to build chemical and biological weapons. Tactical military assistance also was provided, including satellite photos of the battlefield. While congressional inquiries and press accounts have sketched out some of these facts over the years, the current Bush administration continues to plead ignorance or question the reliability of the stories. Last September, for example, Newsweek reported that the Reagan administration in the 1980s had allowed sales to Iraq of computer databases that Saddam could use to track political opponents and shipments of "bacteria/fungi/protozoa" that could help produce anthrax and other biological weapons. [Newsweek issue dated Sept. 23, 2002] Sen. Robert C. Byrd (Democrat - W Virginia) asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the Newsweek story at a Senate hearing on Sept. 19. "Did the United States help Iraq to acquire the building blocks of biological weapons during the Iran-Iraq war?" Byrd inquired. "Are we, in fact, now facing the possibility of reaping what we have sown." "Certainly not to my knowledge," Rumsfeld responded. "I have no knowledge of United States companies or government being involved in assisting Iraq develop chemical, biological or nuclear weapons." So even the current U.S. secretary of defense -- who served the Reagan administration as a special envoy to the Middle East in 1983-84 and personally met with Saddam -- says he doesn't know about this secret history. Promises of further investigation last September also haven't brought answers to Byrd's questions.

  Beyond those "dual-use" supplies, other unanswered questions relate to whether then-Vice President George H.W. Bush urged Saddam to use greater ferocity in waging his war with Iran, advice that led the Iraqi air force to bomb civilian centers in Tehran and other Iranian cities in 1986. A lengthy article by Murray Waas and Craig Unger in the New Yorker in 1992 described the senior Bush passing on advice to Saddam, through Arab intermediaries, for this more aggressive bombing campaign. Yet the historical question has never been settled. The senior Bush has never been subjected to a careful questioning, though it is true that Saddam did intensify his air campaign after Bush's trip. The answer would be relevant now as the younger Bush asserts that Saddam's penchant for military aggression justifies a new war. If Bush's father actually was counseling Saddam to be more aggressive, that's a fact that the American people ought to know. Waas and Unger described the motive for the Reagan administration's tactical advice as a kind of diplomatic billiard shot. By getting Iraq to expand use of its air force, the Iranians would be more desperate for U.S.-made HAWK anti-aircraft missile parts, giving Washington more leverage with the Iranians. Iran's need to protect their cities from Iraqi air attacks gave impetus to the Reagan administration's arms-for-hostage scheme, which later became known as the Iran-contra affair. [The New Yorker, Nov. 2, 1992.]

  The devastation from the Iran-Iraq war, which finally ended in 1988, also set the stage for the Gulf War of 1990-91. The eight-year war had crippled the Iraqi economy and left Saddam's government deeply in debt. Having been egged on by the oil-rich sheikdoms to blunt the revolutionary zeal of Iran, Saddam felt betrayed when Kuwait wouldn't write off Iraq's debts and rejected a $10 billion loan. Beyond that, Saddam was furious with Kuwait for driving down world oil prices by overproducing and for slant-drilling into Iraqi oil fields. Many Iraqis also considered Kuwait, historically, a part of Iraq. Before attacking Kuwait, however, Saddam consulted George H.W. Bush's administration. First, the U.S. State Department informed Saddam that Washington had "no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait." Then, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam, "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." As Foreign Policy magazine observed, "the United States may not have intended to give Iraq a green light, but that is effectively what it did." [Foreign Policy, Jan.-Feb. 2003] While Glaspie's strange diplomacy drew some congressional and press attention during the previous Gulf crisis, the full context of George H.W. Bush's relationship with Saddam -- which might help explain why the Iraqi dictator so disastrously misread the U.S. signals -- has never been explained.

  Beyond that missing history of U.S.-Iraq relations, there's the secondary issue of cover-ups conducted by the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Democratic sources say Clinton heeded personal appeals from the elder Bush and other top Republicans to close the books on the so-called "Iraqgate" investigation -- as well as probes into secret Reagan-Bush dealings with Iran -- soon after the Democrat defeated Bush in the 1992 election. Some Democrats say Clinton agreed to shelve the investigations out of concern for national security and the country's unity. Others suggest that Clinton was tricked by the wily elder Bush with promises that a pullback on the Iran-Iraq investigations might win Clinton some bipartisanship with the Republicans in Congress, a tantalizing prospect that turned out to be a mirage. Whatever the reasons, Clinton's Justice Department did bail out the Reagan-Bush team in the mid-1990s when more disclosures about the secret dealings with Iraq flooded to the surface. Perhaps the most important disclosure was an affidavit by former Reagan administration official Howard Teicher that was filed in connection with a criminal trial in Miami in 1995. The Teicher affidavit was the first sworn public account by a Reagan insider of the covert U.S.-Iraq relationship. Teicher, who served on Reagan's National Security Council staff, traced the U.S. tilt to Iraq to a turning point in the war in 1982 when Iran gained the offensive and fears swept through the U.S. government that Iran's army might slice through Iraq to the oil fields of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. "In June 1982, President Reagan decided that the United States could not afford to allow Iraq to lose the war to Iran," Teicher wrote in his affidavit. Teicher said he helped draft a secret national security decision directive that Reagan signed to authorize covert U.S. assistance to Saddam Hussein's military. "The NSDD, including even its identifying number, is classified," Teicher wrote in 1995. The effort to arm the Iraqis was "spearheaded" by CIA Director William Casey and involved his deputy, Robert Gates, according to Teicher's affidavit. "The CIA, including both CIA Director Casey and Deputy Director Gates, knew of, approved of, and assisted in the sale of non-U.S. origin military weapons, ammunition and vehicles to Iraq," Teicher wrote. In 1984, Teicher said he went to Iraq with Rumsfeld to convey a secret Israeli offer to assist Iraq after Israel had concluded that Iran was becoming a greater danger. "I traveled with Rumsfeld to Baghdad and was present at the meeting in which Rumsfeld told Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz about Israel's offer of assistance," Teicher wrote. "Aziz refused even to accept the Israelis' letter to Hussein offering assistance because Aziz told us that he would be executed on the spot by Hussein if he did so." Another key player in Reagan's Iraq tilt was then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, according to Teicher's affidavit. "In 1986, President Reagan sent a secret message to Saddam Hussein telling him that Iraq should step up its air war and bombing of Iran," Teicher wrote. "This message was delivered by Vice President Bush who communicated it to Egyptian President Mubarak, who in turn passed the message to Saddam Hussein. "Similar strategic operational military advice was passed to Saddam Hussein through various meetings with European and Middle Eastern heads of state. I authored Bush's talking points for the 1986 meeting with Mubarak and personally attended numerous meetings with European and Middle East heads of state where the strategic operational advice was communicated." Teicher's affidavit represented a major break in the historical mystery of U.S. aid to Iraq. But it complicated a criminal arms-trafficking case that Clinton's Justice Department was prosecuting against Teledyne Industries and a salesman named Ed Johnson. They had allegedly sold explosive pellets to Chilean arms manufacturer Carlos Cardoen, who used them to manufacture cluster bombs for Iraq.

  Prior to trying the Teledyne case, Clinton's Justice Department declared that its investigation "did not find evidence that U.S. agencies or officials illegally armed Iraq." But the review noted, curiously, that the CIA had withheld an unknown number of documents that were contained in "sensitive compartments" that were denied to the investigators. Despite that denial of access, the Clinton investigators expressed confidence in their conclusions. Two weeks after that exonerating report, however, Teicher's affidavit was filed in federal court in Miami, embarrassing senior Justice Department officials. After taking the word of former Reagan-Bush officials and agreeing not to examine the CIA's "sensitive compartments," the Justice Department officials looked gullible, incompetent or complicit. They took their fury out on Teicher, insisting that his affidavit was unreliable and threatening him with dire consequences for coming forward. Yet, while deeming Teicher's affidavit false, the Clinton administration also declared the document a state secret, classifying it and putting it under court seal. A few copies, however, had been distributed outside the court and the text was soon posted on the Internet. After officially suppressing the Teicher affidavit, the Justice Department prosecutors persuaded the judge presiding in the Teledyne-Johnson case to rule testimony about the Reagan-Bush policies to be irrelevant. Unable to mount its planned defense, Teledyne agreed to plead guilty and accept a $13 million fine. Johnson, the salesman who had earned a modest salary in the mid-$30,000 range, was convicted of illegal arms trafficking and given a prison term. Before a U.S. invasion of Iraq begins, former President Clinton might be asked whether he was approached by George H.W. Bush or a Bush emissary with an request to drop investigations into Reagan-Bush policies in the Middle East. Teicher, who has since 1995 refused to discuss his affidavit, could be given a congressional forum to testify about his knowledge. So could other surviving U.S. officials named in Teicher's affidavit, including Gates and Rumsfeld. Foreign leaders mentioned in the affidavit also could be approached, including former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Mubarak and Aziz.

  George W. Bush also has some questions he should answer before missiles start crashing into Baghdad. When he took office in 2001, one of his first acts as president was to block the legally required release of documents from the Reagan-Bush administration. Then, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a stunned nation rallied around him, Bush issued an even more sweeping secrecy order. He granted former presidents and vice presidents or their surviving family members the right to stop release of historical records, including those related to "military, diplomatic or national security secrets." Bush's order stripped the Archivist of the United States of the power to overrule claims of privilege from former presidents and their representatives. [For details on Bush's secrecy policies, see the New York Times, Jan. 3, 2003] By a twist of history, Bush's order eventually could give him control of both his and his father's records covering 12 years of the Reagan-Bush era and however long Bush's own presidential term lasts, potentially a 20-year swath of documentary evidence. As the junior Bush now takes the nation to war in the name of freedom and democracy, he might at least be challenged to reverse that secrecy and release all relevant documents on the history of the Reagan-Bush policies in the Middle East. That way, the American people can decide for themselves whether Saddam Hussein is an aggressive leader whose behavior is so depraved that a preemptive war is the only reasonable course of action. Or they might conclude that Saddam, like many other dictators through history, operates within a framework of self-preservation, which means he could be controlled by a combination of tough arms inspections and the threat of military retaliation. Without the full history -- as embarrassing as that record might be to the last five U.S. presidents -- the American people cannot judge whether the nation's security will be enhanced or endangered by Bush's decision to put the United States on its own aggressive course of action.
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  AllTimeJeff

  I hate to say this, but the first person you ban because his mere appearance offends you, or if he is a dictator who has blood on his hands (and Bush doesn't?) takes away all of our freeness of speech. Our freedoms are only as strong as our weakest links. I applaud Bollinger. It shows his confidence in the intellgence of the audience who chose to listen. And Ahmadinejad's comments show why you should allow freedom of speech. His assertions about the Holocaust and that homosexuality doesn't exist in Iran speak for themselves! It's called giving him enough rope to hang himself.

  Ahmadinejad is one of many dictators in the world who are repugnant and immoral. But they are allowed in a free and democratic world to talk. That is because the general public is allowed to judge him by his talk. In Iran, Ahmadinejad quashes dissent. He can't do that here. And he can't deal with cross examination. That was very clear by how he handled criticism. It is clear that he isn't use to it. He can make his assertions as he always does, but he can't back them up, and he can't supress questioning, so he will go back home and claim that Allah will kill us all. (if Jehovah doesn't get us first!! lol)

  Those of us who use to be JW's certainly have our own points of view. But one thing we do appreciate is the ability to be ourselves, to speak our minds, and to let our ideas or lack of them stand on their own merits. Sometimes, we might argue about points of view (thiestic versus athiestic is always a popular one) but I would rather argue myself into a dirtpile then not have the freedom both to speak and to hear dissenting points of view. Remember, we weren't allowed to consider other points of view while in the borg...

  Edited for PS: I butchered the spelling on this post... SHEESH!!
• 

  worldtraveller

  At first I supported his right to free speach 'till I heard the poison spewing fourth. Another hohocaust denier. Bla bla bla bla Islam.

  Only good news about Islam is the 72 virgins waiting for us. Well, myself and Rosie O anyway.
• 

  SirNose586

  Well, he had all the opportunity to explain his earlier boneheaded comments, or withdraw them, but he failed. He failed, and was mocked by students. Remember when we let Khruschev talk before the UN, and he took off his shoe and began banging it on the lecturn?

  You let these fools hang themselves, like ATJeff said. Right now he is swinging in the wind...
• 

  Rabbit

  AllTimeJeff

  I hate to say this, but the first person you ban because his mere appearance offends you, or if he is a dictator who has blood on his hands (and Bush doesn't?) takes away all of our freeness of speech. Our freedoms are only as strong as our weakest links. I applaud Bollinger. It shows his confidence in the intellgence of the audience who chose to listen. And Ahmadinejad's comments show why you should allow freedom of speech. His assertions about the Holocaust and that homosexuality doesn't exist in Iran speak for themselves! It's called giving him enough rope to hang himself

  I think this president, like our president...are their own worst enemies. I absolutely agree with Jeff, let 'em come and open their mouths when they have to face tough, intelligent questions from journalists that aren't afraid for their lives. Let them speak, so the whole world can see their lies and hypocrisy.

  What homosexuals ????? He said Iran doesn't have any homosexuals ! Why...cause they torture and kill all they can find ? Of course, in reality, they are arrested daily on any kind of trumped up charge, anything besides homosexuality that is...

  Ever notice the physical & single-minded similarity between Bush & Ahmadinejad ?

  Rabbit
• 

  Iron Rod

  Well,at the risk of making everyone angry with me, I feel compelled to point out a couple of things. First of all, any statements regarding his right to free speech are moot. The Constitution grants free speech rights to U.S. citizens, which he is not. Second, Iran is the number one state sponsor of terrorism in the world. Third, Iran is thumbing it's nose at the entire world (not just the U.S.) regarding their nuclear weapons program.For these reasons and others, I think it was a mistake for the university to even invite this thug to speak there. I agree that the mistake was somewhat abrogated by the fact that he made a fool of himself. However, everything that he said was already known from interviews and Iranian television broadcasts. The Holocaust denial,desire to wipe out Isreal and America,as well as his Apocalyptic religious views were on record. So nothing new came out of this.

  And really, comparing President Bush to thisguy? When was the last time you heard of Bush having homosexuals and political opponents executed?

  No,I am not a Bush apologist, nor did I vote for him. I'm just asking for a more accurate sense of proportion here.
• 

  barry

  I agree with you iron rod this Iranian is basicly a savage but Im not even sure if that is teh right word to use. When captain cook went on his journey of discovery he reffered to th enoble savage he had respect for the people he discovered even though they were primitave.

  To compare him to president Bush and to claim Americans are fed properganda just as Iranians are is a lie. Steve why dont you take a trip to Iran and stay there. I dont think you will.
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  AllTimeJeff

  Hi there Iron Rod... No anger here! Glad you have a take... Here are some further observations before I go to work....

  Iran has one of the highest per capita ratios of western, college educated grads in the muslim world. The (college educated) population itself is quite liberal. Most journalists who go there will tell you that. Iran got hijacked by the Ayotollah (sp?) in the late 70's and the governement has since been run by theocratic muslim zealots, like Ahmadinejad. It isn't Iran that is thumbing it's nose at the world, anymore then I would allow someone to think that Bush represents me! (he doesn't...) He is the leader. You don't let him sniff ground zero of course, unless you can turn back time and have him stand under the buildings as they fell. But he wanted to represent Iran as he felt it should be. AND HE DID!

  As far as the state sponser of terrorism, no country except the USA could have pulled the UN's arm around it's back, made it cry "mercy!" and got an authroization for a war on the grounds that they did. Bush has allowed torture and an invasion of privacy. This isn't the point of this thread, but my point wasn't to say directly that Bush and Ahmadinejad are from the same piece of cloth. But they aren't that far away from each other in allowing their ideological and political views to be directly influenced by their sure "knowledge" of what their god wants. (Which coincidentally, each of their gods want their respective countries to kill each other and prove that his god is the true one....)

  When was the last time you heard of Bush having homosexuals and political opponents executed?

  See, you can't do that in the USA and get away with it. It's been a long time, fifty whole years! 50 years ago, you could get away with killing a black man or a homosexual, esp in the South! Thanks goodness we as a country did away with that so long ago...... (sarcastic response...)

  Since the time that America embraced civil rights and not killing people who were different they they, Bush through the GOP machine actually took an honorable fellow republican running against him in 2000 (John McCain) and implied in the S Carolina primary that he fathered an illigitimate black baby. In 2004, he took an honorable Vietnam war veteren, (a war that Bush got out of serving in) and thanks to Swift Boat, made it seem that he was never there. Thats more then politics as usual, thats character assasination. The GOP has mastered that kind of execution very well.

  As far as homosexuals, what do you think banning gay marriage is all about? Do you believe the fundies who have hijacked the GOP don't want homosexuals destroyed by god? (Fallwell? Pat Roberston anyone?) Several Republicans say that homosexuality is destroying the "American" way of life. Lewis Black has a great take on this, it's on youtube. It even has a JW reference...

  http://youtube.com/watch?v=XK5gGATcF_4

  Interested in your responses! Always good imo, to have an intelligent discussion on the facts.....
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  Mary

  I find it hard to believe that this idiot thought he could come over to visit with "The Great Satan" and not get verbally pummelled by 'the enemy'. That would be tantamount to Bush going to visit the University of Tehran and expecting a warm greeting-----it just ain't gonna happen.