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Originally posted by FreeMason
Is it your duty to track filth into our nice clean house?
This is not a "deconstruction" of anything, it is a witty retort by a person who has no knowledge of either side's argument, just opinions.
"A simplistic attempt at 'Gotcha'. Allow me to explain Moore's motivation, as if it needed explaining to anyone with a concept of logic, law and due process. Bin Laden IS innocent until proven guilty in the eyes of the law. That IS the American Way. Indeed, it's the World Way. But in order to prove his guilt, one much capture him and put him to trial."
We didn't do that with Hitler, this person is a moron.
The author of this "deconstruction" does nothing but attempt to word a retort against those factual points as being "non-important" or "biased" because the author of this "deconstruction" can not raise factual counter-points of his own.
It's a pile of garbage, lending veracity to that great warning of never doing your research online.
Originally posted by donguillermo
FreeMason, you spread more filth on this forum than anyone else. Just because you disagree with something does not make it filth.
That is a brazen lie. Chris Parry raises many factual counterpoints.
Again, this is a perfect description of your post -- a pile of garbage.
"I'll just say that the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once. (Actually, that's not quite right. It is briefly mentioned but only, and smarmily, because of the bad period when Washington preferred Saddam to the likewise unmentioned Ayatollah Khomeini.)"
If I were an editor who wanted to twist Hitchens' words here, I could have changed the above passage to: "Moore mentions the 30-year record of war crimes and repression of Saddam's Baath Party, while pointing out that the Bush cabinet members that very much wanted to go to war against him also once sold him chemical weapons, financed his army and called him their great friend in the Middle East" - and it wouldn't be a lie. That's exactly what Moore says, but Hitchens prefers to twist it so he looks eville.
Hitchens is essentially admitting the same thing Moore is saying - that the US built Saddam, and that the blood of those Iraqis he killed and tortured is on that country's hands. But he says it in such a way that anyone who hasn't seen the film could say "Yeah! That Michael Moore, he's a liar!"
Which is the title of the piece yet, remarkably, we haven't actually got to a single lie yet. Let's see if any pop up in the rest of the article...
The coup that brought the Ba'ath Party to power in 1963 was celebrated by the United States.
The CIA had a hand in it. They had funded the Ba'ath Party - of which Saddam Hussein was a young member - when it was in opposition.
US diplomat James Akins served in the Baghdad Embassy at the time. Mr. Akins said, "I knew all the Ba'ath Party leaders and I liked them".
"The CIA were definitely involved in that coup. We saw the rise of the Ba'athists as a way of replacing a pro-Soviet government with a pro-American one and you don't get that chance very often.
…On February 8, a military coup in Baghdad, in which the Baath Party played a leading role, overthrew Qassim. Support for the conspirators was limited. In the first hours of fighting, they had only nine tanks under their control. The Baath Party had just 850 active members. But Qassim ignored warnings about the impending coup. What tipped the balance against him was the involvement of the United States. He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1961, he threatened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized part of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC),
the foreign oil consortium that exploited Iraq's oil. In retrospect, it was the ClAs favorite coup. "We really had the ts crossed on what was happening," James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. "We regarded it as a great victory." Iraqi participants later confirmed American involvement. "We came to power on a CIA train," admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party secretary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror.
According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.
Adel Darwish, Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials separately confirmed Darwish's account.
Originally posted by Bleys
donguillermo-I don't understand how you can say that Chris Hitchens is a conservative. This man simply hates most everyone in power liberal or conservative.
By FreeMason
Ugh, way to post crap.
First Akins is not the CIA, he doesn't know that for sure.
"We really had the t’s crossed on what was happening,"James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. "We regarded it as a great victory."
Originally posted by donguillermo
I think he is a nutcase. He praises Ahmad Chalabi but has harsh words for Mother Teresa.