Guess Who is Endorsing Kerry *serious political stuff*

[by-tor]

Not sure exactly, but it's over ?0.80 per litre.


Google says: 1 US gallon = 3.7854118 litres

So we're paying just over ?3 per gallon. And there's about $1.7 per pound (higher than I thought, but anyway... ), so petrol here would be around $5 per gallon.

Your gas prices have come down a bit over the past few months then? I was reading an article back in June that was talking about new taxes, and pushing the price up around $6.00 a gallon (about 0.93p per liter). Did that tax not go thru?

[Devil's Advocate]

But most of the price difference is in the amount of taxation, isn't it? Any idea what you're taxed per litre? Over here the tax amounts are posted on the pumps.

Yeah, I've heard figures like 75% quoted, but I don't know for sure.

[Devil's Advocate]

Your gas prices have come down a bit over the past few months then? I was reading an article back in June that was talking about new taxes, and pushing the price up around $6.00 a gallon (about 0.93p per liter). Did that tax not go thru?

Nope. In the light of the crude oil price increases at the time of the report in your link, the scheduled tax increase was either dropped or postponed. Or the cost of crude came down again. I dunno.

[ElfDude]

Dang... this stuff just keeps on going.

Flagstaff Republican Party HQ Vandalized
http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_i ... ryID=96592

Bush/Cheney Cincinnati headquarters robbed
http://www.enquirer.com/midday/10/10232 ... eakin.html

[ElfDude]

Meanwhile, in the news: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/041011/325/f4cpk.html

So... what was that about the war making the world a safer place?

This story was repeated by the New York Times on Monday. Some interesting light was shed on the story earlier today.

To quote the Drudge Report:

Jumping on the TIMES exclusive, Dem presidential candidate John Kerry blasted the Bush administration for its failure to "guard those stockpiles."

"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration," Kerry said.

In an election week rush:

**ABCNEWS Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 4 Times
**CBSNEWS Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 7 Times
**MSNBC Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 37 Times
**CNN Mentioned The Iraq Explosives Depot At Least 50 Times

But tonight, NBCNEWS reported: The 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives were already missing back in April 10, 2003 -- when U.S. troops arrived at the installation south of Baghdad!

An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq.

According to NBCNEWS, the HMX and RDX explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived.

It is not clear why the NYTIMES failed to inform readers how the cache had been missing for 18 months -- and was reportedly missing when troops first arrived.

The TIMES left the impression the weapons site had been looted of its explosives recently, and since Iraq has been under US control.

The TIMES reported: "The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday."

[In a fresh Page One story set for Tuesday on the matter, the TIMES once again omits any reference to troops not finding any explosives at the site when they arrived in April of 2003. Attempts to reach managing editor Jill Abramson late Monday were unsuccessful.]

"The U.S. Army was at the site one day after the liberation and the weapons were already gone," a top Republican blasted from Washington late Monday.

The International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors last saw the explosives in January 2003 when they took an inventory and placed fresh seals on the bunkers.

Dem vp hopeful John Edwards blasted Bush for not securing the explosives: "It is reckless and irresponsible to fail to protect and safeguard one of the largest weapons sites in the country. And by either ignoring these mistakes or being clueless about them, George Bush has failed. He has failed as our commander in chief; he has failed as president."

A senior Bush official e-mailed DRUDGE late Monday: "Let me get this straight, are Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards now saying we did not go into Iraq soon enough? We should have invaded and liberated Iraq sooner?"

[ElfDude]

Let's go back in time. Let's go back to late January 2003. On January 24, 2003 CNN reported:

"BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- U.N. weapons inspectors returned Friday to Iraq's massive al QaQaa complex, a site they've visited every day for the past week and a dozen times since restarting weapons inspections last year.

And with the United States firmly engaged in shoring up support for a possible military action against Iraq, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's son Uday warned that the Sept. 11 terror attacks "will look like a joke" if Iraq is attacked. " http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/01/ ... spections/

Oh my, Uday, you did go on didn't you? If he never had WMD, I wonder what he was going to use to make 9/11 look like a joke... but that's not the point. What's the point? Well, what we see here is that if anyone's incompetence allowed Al Qaqaa to be looted, it was that of the the U.N. They were the ones keeping an eye on this stuff. A couple of months later the U.S. finally invaded. Baghdad fell on April 9th. This stuff was discovered missing on April 10th. The real question now is: If explosives have gone missing, and happened while we were dithering around with the United Nations for 14 months, what else might be missing and where is it?

And yet again, we see the incompetence (if not the corruption) of the U.N. demonstrated. This is the U.N. to which John Kerry wants to subordinate the foreign policy of the U.S. If there's one thing he has never flip-flopped on, it's his devotion to the U.N.

This was the October surprise. And it has blown up in Kerry's face. And he's in denial. Despite the truth being revealed that the NYT story was completely bogus, Kerry is still talking like nothing's changed. Speaking in Wisconsin this morning, Kerry continued to blast Bush for his "failure" to secure explosives at Al Qaqaa... ignoring reports that those explosives already had vanished before U.S. troops arrived. To quote him, "Yesterday we learned that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives vanished from one of Iraq's most sensitive military installations after the invasion..."

No, Senator... they were gone before the invasion. Your precious U.N. lost them... likely transferred from one terrorist (Saddam) to another. And you're still trying to convince us otherwise.

[ElfDude]

In all fairness, I told you if I found a story about conservatives behaving badly I'd post it too. It's not a shooting on any headquarters or anything like that, but the kid did make a threat.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/ ... -headlines

WEST PALM BEACH ? An 18-year-old Marine recruit remained in jail on Wednesday, charged with threatening to stab his girlfriend over her choice for president, news partner NewsChannel 5 reported in its noon broadcast.

The enlistee, Steven Scott Soper, of Lake Worth, became enraged Tuesday night when his 18-year-old girlfriend said she was leaving him -- and voting for John Kerry for president.

[Devil's Advocate]

... Steven Scott Soper, ...

ummmm, no relation.....

[ElfDude]

... Steven Scott Soper, ...

ummmm, no relation.....

Heh, is that your family name?

[ElfDude]

Well, what do you know?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national ... -6257r.htm

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published October 28, 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.
John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.
"The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units."
Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration.
Most of Saddam's most powerful arms were systematically separated from other arms like mortars, bombs and rockets, and sent to Syria and Lebanon, and possibly to Iran, he said.
The Russian involvement in helping disperse Saddam's weapons, including some 380 tons of RDX and HMX, is still being investigated, Mr. Shaw said.
The RDX and HMX, which are used to manufacture high-explosive and nuclear weapons, are probably of Russian origin, he said.
Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita could not be reached for comment.
The disappearance of the material was reported in a letter Oct. 10 from the Iraqi government to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Disclosure of the missing explosives Monday in a New York Times story was used by the Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry, who accused the Bush administration of failing to secure the material.
Al-Qaqaa, a known Iraqi weapons site, was monitored closely, Mr. Shaw said.
"That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special explosives] disappearing was impossible," Mr. Shaw said. "And Number 2, if the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."
The Pentagon disclosed yesterday that the Al-Qaqaa facility was defended by Fedayeen Saddam, Special Republican Guard and other Iraqi military units during the conflict. U.S. forces defeated the defenders around April 3 and found the gates to the facility open, the Pentagon said in a statement yesterday.
A military unit in charge of searching for weapons, the Army's 75th Exploitation Task Force, then inspected Al-Qaqaa on May 8, May 11 and May 27, 2003, and found no high explosives that had been monitored in the past by the IAEA.
The Pentagon said there was no evidence of large-scale movement of explosives from the facility after April 6.
"The movement of 377 tons of heavy ordnance would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks prior to and subsequent to the 3rd Infantry Division's arrival at the facility," the statement said.
The statement also said that the material may have been removed from the site by Saddam's regime.
According to the Pentagon, U.N. arms inspectors sealed the explosives at Al-Qaqaa in January 2003 and revisited the site in March and noted that the seals were not broken.
It is not known whether the inspectors saw the explosives in March. The U.N. team left the country before the U.S.-led invasion began March 20, 2003.
A second defense official said documents on the Russian support to Iraq reveal that Saddam's government paid the Kremlin for the special forces to provide security for Iraq's Russian arms and to conduct counterintelligence activities designed to prevent U.S. and Western intelligence services from learning about the arms pipeline through Syria.
The Russian arms-removal program was initiated after Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian intelligence chief, could not persuade Saddam to give in to U.S. and Western demands, this official said.
A small portion of Iraq's 650,000 tons to 1 million tons of conventional arms that were found after the war were looted after the U.S.-led invasion, Mr. Shaw said. Russia was Iraq's largest foreign supplier of weaponry, he said.
However, the most important and useful arms and explosives appear to have been separated and moved out as part of carefully designed program. "The organized effort was done in advance of the conflict," Mr. Shaw said.
The Russian forces were tasked with moving special arms out of the country.
Mr. Shaw said foreign intelligence officials believe the Russians worked with Saddam's Mukhabarat intelligence service to separate out special weapons, including high explosives and other arms and related technology, from standard conventional arms spread out in some 200 arms depots.
The Russian weapons were then sent out of the country to Syria, and possibly Lebanon in Russian trucks, Mr. Shaw said.
Mr. Shaw said he believes that the withdrawal of Russian-made weapons and explosives from Iraq was part of plan by Saddam to set up a "redoubt" in Syria that could be used as a base for launching pro-Saddam insurgency operations in Iraq.
The Russian units were dispatched beginning in January 2003 and by March had destroyed hundreds of pages of documents on Russian arms supplies to Iraq while dispersing arms to Syria, the second official said.
Besides their own weapons, the Russians were supplying Saddam with arms made in Ukraine, Belarus, Bulgaria and other Eastern European nations, he said.
"Whatever was not buried was put on lorries and sent to the Syrian border," the defense official said.
Documents reviewed by the official included itineraries of military units involved in the truck shipments to Syria. The materials outlined in the documents included missile components, MiG jet parts, tank parts and chemicals used to make chemical weapons, the official said.
The director of the Iraqi government front company known as the Al Bashair Trading Co. fled to Syria, where he is in charge of monitoring arms holdings and funding Iraqi insurgent activities, the official said.
Also, an Arabic-language report obtained by U.S. intelligence disclosed the extent of Russian armaments. The 26-page report was written by Abdul Tawab Mullah al Huwaysh, Saddam's minister of military industrialization, who was captured by U.S. forces May 2, 2003.
The Russian "spetsnaz" or special-operations forces were under the GRU military intelligence service and organized large commercial truck convoys for the weapons removal, the official said.
Regarding the explosives, the new Iraqi government reported that 194.7 metric tons of HMX, or high-melting-point explosive, and 141.2 metric tons of RDX, or rapid-detonation explosive, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, were missing.
The material is used in nuclear weapons and also in making military "plastic" high explosive.
Defense officials said the Russians can provide information on what happened to the Iraqi weapons and explosives that were transported out of the country. Officials believe the Russians also can explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs.

[Big Brother]

Can we invade Russia now?

[ElfDude]

Can we invade Russia now?

LOL!

Well... I dunno. We saw what happened to Hitler when he invaded them...

[Big Brother]

France also had interest in Iraq prior to the war.

They had investments there in telecommunications.

[ElfDude]

France also had interest in Iraq prior to the war.

They had investments there in telecommunications.

Not to mention all the bribes they were getting.

[awip2062]

So, do we ged to invade France instead?