iraq elections..

Discussion in 'America Attacks!' started by Megara, Jan 30, 2005.

  1. Pointbreak

    Pointbreak Banned

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    Oh really, it wasn't? Funny how you're such an expert on what it meant seeing as you never brought up article 103 before.

    In the event of a conflict between the obligations of the Members of the United Nations under the present Charter and their obligations under any other international agreement, their obligations under the present Charter shall prevail.

    Not meant to make it immune to international law? It explicitly overrules other treaties, if there is a conflict, follow the UN. It couldn't be more clear. The whole point of this clause is to resolve situations of conflict between treaties and the UN Charter. Its time you stopped trying to weasel out of it. The security council has authorised the occupation, so that's the end of the legal argument.

    With regards to Halliburton, the whole scandal was over an unannouced accounting change which affected $89 million of revenue. The SEC didn't even tell them the accounting change was wrong - just that they should have announced it. Neither their new or old auditors had a problem with it, and they still use it. When the change was announced, long before the Iraq war, there was no impact on the market price of Halliburton shares. And you compare this to Enron? So you are again making up an exciting fairy tale with nothing to back it up.
     
  2. Higherthanhell

    Higherthanhell Banned

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    Pointbreak
    True..they and Chenney got rich on the oil for food scam and tax evasion..this fake war is just a bonus.

    When did we go from the war on terror to installing puppet governments and imposing democracy at gunpoint? Bush and his cronies are war criminals and anyone that supports his murdering, lying ass is a idiot
     
  3. Psy Fox

    Psy Fox Member

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    Right it says you can't charge a memeber of the UN following the UNSC. Yet no where does it state that you can't challenge the UNSC in a court of law. Meaning you can't bring the USA up on charges for following the UNSC yet you can bring the UNSC up on charges.

    Not that Halliburtion scandal. The one where Halliburton's engineering and construction unit, inflated its financial results by overbilling for services, overstating its accounts receivable due from customers and understating accounts payable owed to vendors.
     
  4. Pointbreak

    Pointbreak Banned

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    Maybe you think there is a big document somewhere out there called "international law", in a nice leather bound book in Geneva, and everything is written down. There isn't, and that's not how it works. The UN charter says that amidst all the treaties, customary law, and conventional law, the UN charter takes precedence. UN Security Council resolutions are binding.

    How about providing a link to information on the Halliburton scandal, since your description seems to apply to the one I just discussed.
     
  5. Amanda's Shadow

    Amanda's Shadow Flower Child

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    Although I am an incorrigible optomist, I have found no possible reason to hope pr beleive that even if these elections were done correctly, and that the US was helping and not hindering the peace efforts in the Middle East, that the soldiers (quite a few of whom I know) will be coming home soon. This is the real tragedy of war. In the process of fightig against terrorism and violence, we have multiplied the pain and suffering of civiliatns and 1600 coalition forces have died. (Thats coalition forces- it does not include all of the civilian/insurgent deaths.) I always thought, growing up, that we lived in a time where everything worked out in the end, and that people really got along. But, I am starting to realize how naive those thoughts were. I am scared for our future as a nation, and as the human race.

    I think it is time for people- MORE people- to start speaking their hearts and minds and stop following their checkbooks, because its is leading us into horrible situations from which we will never recover.


    Peace Please
    Amanda
     
  6. Psy Fox

    Psy Fox Member

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    Your forget Nuremberg that made it clear any govermnet can be charged with war crimes regardless of international community. The Leage of Nations approved of Nazi Germany's inital exansion yet in Nuremberg the Leage of Nations resolutions regarding Germany was considered irrelevent to the trial.

    Nuremberg put international laws above the international community.
    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic...hive/2004/08/06/BUGUP83PHB1.DTL&type=business
     
  7. Pointbreak

    Pointbreak Banned

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    Germany left the League of Nations in 1933. Thanks for wasting my time, if anyone else wants to debate this endless stream of made up stories, go ahead, because I'm done.
     
  8. Higherthanhell

    Higherthanhell Banned

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    Good........if you don't have the brains to see that these fake elections are just one of the many Bush schemes you've lost before you started. Ain't nobody buying bullshit here.
     
  9. Psy Fox

    Psy Fox Member

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    Yet the League of Nations still had Germany on its agenda and supported the early explansion of Hitler (before Poland).
     
  10. Higherthanhell

    Higherthanhell Banned

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    Another neocon bites the dust
    [​IMG]
     
  11. mynameiskc

    mynameiskc way to go noogs!

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    whatever. i'm keeping my fingers crossed that some good can some out of this clusterfuck. we're there, i'm hoping we're doing something right, and i'm hoping the innocent iraqis will be able to experience something good. god knows they deserve it.
     
  12. wolf_at_door

    wolf_at_door Senior Member

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    I suppose that rightwing Israelis would be not underrate their estimations for voting rates (but rather be the first ones to overrate the 70% we’ve been lied about in the western bourgeois press).



    This is what the Iraqi experts at the trigger happy rightwing zionist Israeli DEBKAfiles estimated:



    “DEBKAfile’s Iraq experts reveal that, while the turnout is officially estimated at 60%, the real figure will probably turn out to be quite a bit lower, no more than 40-45% - in itself an exceptional feat.”



    Even in shiitic areas, the voting rate was low, according to DEBKAfiles:



    “In Basra, Iraq’s second largest town, the turnout was 32-35%, although Iraqi election officials claimed 90%.”



    And it’s obvious that an election can’t be carried out, in an country occupied by a power with no legal mandate at all. The US led coalition had control over all the voting centres, and they just closed the centres down, if they considered them too unsafe. But which guarantee do we have about the validity of these considerations, when the US wouldn’t allow ANY voting observers to observe the election?

    Also read at DEBKAfiles:



    “The Sunni districts predictably obeyed their leaders boycott directive. In internal memos, American military officials reported that 150 voting centers never opened at all in some Sunni strongholds.”


    With no voting observers during the election the public have no guarantee to believe the lie about the 70%. And there's not any guarantee to believe that DEBKAfiles sources are not overrated, but I can't belive they're underrated.



    Source:

    http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=974





     
  13. AT98BooBoo

    AT98BooBoo Senior Member

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    I had heard on NPR that 9,000 votes were recorded in a town of only 50 houses. They really have brought American style democracy to Iraq.
     
  14. LaughinWillow

    LaughinWillow Member

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    Published on Friday, February 11, 2005 by the Guardian (UK)
    The Cheers Were All Ours
    Iraq's Illegitimate Election Did Not Justify the Invasion, Nor Did It Make Occupation Popular

    by Jonathan Steele

    Iraq is a "totalitarian state", and that's official, according to the logic of Condoleezza Rice this week. Maybe it was because she was in carefree Paris. Maybe it was because she was having breakfast with a bunch of French intellectuals. But the new US secretary of state let down her political hair and stunned the company with the looseness of her terminology.

    She was talking about Iran, the latest Bush administration target for regime change. She used to call Iran's Islamic republic "authoritarian", she told them, but since the parliamentary polls last spring, in which candidates at one end of the spectrum were off the ballot, Iran had moved to being "totalitarian".

    She did not draw any comparison with Iraq, of course, let alone with Saudi Arabia (which embarked on a men-only, no-parties election yesterday). But the similarities are obvious. If Iran qualifies as totalitarian because it holds an election in which voters had only a limited choice, then the same is true of Iraq, where parties and movements which want an immediate end to the occupation were off the ballot.

    Queues of voters are not the defining issue for a decent election. In Iran last year they were so long that in many places polling stations had to stay open an extra four hours to give everyone a chance. Nor is turnout the decisive marker. Voters take part for a host of reasons.

    El Salvador held an election in 1982, which Reagan administration officials such as John Negroponte, its then ambassador in nearby Honduras and now Washington's man in Iraq, touted as a glorious day for freedom because guerrillas attacked a handful of polling stations and people carried on voting regardless. On the lips of establishment TV anchors the generalization for the whole poll was "they defied the terrorists", as though violence was pervasive.

    A different picture emerged in a small town I visited north of the capital, San Salvador, as the polls were about to close. The queue broke down as frantic would-be voters stormed the desk to try to get their ID cards stamped. They were not specially interested in any of the parties on offer, they told reporters. The government had made a big issue of getting a high turnout, and they were terrified the army would brutalize them if they could not prove they had voted.

    Every election is specific. Long before the Iraqi poll it was clear that Kurds and Shias would vote in large numbers. Their areas have not seen much violence, and both groups saw the poll as a chance to reflect their collective strength in the constitution-writing process. So there should have been no surprise that queues built up.

    Fear of not voting was also a factor, though much less than in El Salvador in 1982. "I tore up my ballot paper," said a young woman who works for a US government-funded NGO in Basra. "But I wanted my finger inked, in case the religious parties check on people in the street."

    Others abstained for different reasons. "Many of my friends will not be voting," Sayed Mudhaffer, a Basra official of the Writers' Union, told me. "Some don't know which list to vote for, because there hasn't been enough campaigning on what they stand for. Some think that because the United Nations isn't supervising, it won't be fair or honest."

    His last point is well taken. As the old saying has it, what matters is not who votes, but who counts. Because of security fears there were even fewer international monitors in Iraq than in Afghanistan last year, and most stayed only a few minutes in the polling places they visited. They saw very little.

    Why is it taking as much as two weeks to come up with a result in Iraq? In the polling station, where I watched the count, when the doors closed last week, they tabulated all 1,500 votes in just over three hours. Everything seemed above board and the results were given out "on background". But they had to be sent to Baghdad for "checking" before a public declaration.

    In many other polling stations there were no observers, not even Iraqi ones. In Basra, even the representative of prime minister Iyad Allawi's party complained of the scope for fraud. Waleed Ketan said he had only been given credentials for 134 monitors while there were 386 polling stations in the province. His point was given substance by the head of the Basra election commission (who is widely accused of links to one of the main religious parties). Asked on three different occasions how many monitors he had accredited, he answered variously 4,000, 6,000, and 8,000.

    The Iraqi election was, in fact, both normal and abnormal. In Basra, many Shias treated it as historic, saying it marked the real end to Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. Embarrassed and humiliated that foreigners rather than Iraqis had toppled him, they seemed proud that the election was an Iraqi show. I heard no one thanking Bush and Blair.

    I also heard no one describe his or her vote as defiance of terrorism, let alone the insurgency. Blair called it "a blow right to the heart of global terrorism". Maybe a voter in Baghdad might have said such a thing. It was not the mood in the Shia south.

    Most gave mundane reasons for their vote: patriotism, a sense of duty, concern over joblessness and power cuts, and the hope that the election might be a first step towards change. There was also a strong underlying feeling that having an elected government could hasten the restoration of sovereignty and an end to the occupation. This was certainly the view of those supporters of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who decided that voting mattered more than the risk of legitimizing the occupation.

    Although some Shias say they supported the US offensive against the largely Sunni city of Falluja, and explain their feelings in terms of revenge for Ba'athist (seen as Sunni) oppression, it is more common to find Shias who deplore the talk of Sunni versus Shia conflict. They blame the foreign occupiers for stressing sectarian identity, an issue which, they say, has never been a matter of significance for ordinary Iraqis.

    So this was certainly not an election which justified the invasion after the event or gave the occupation some kind of popularity among Shias. Nor did it reduce the pressure for a withdrawal of foreign troops and the dismantling of the bases the US is building. The main Sunni parties boycotted the poll because the Americans refused to give a timetable. The Shia parties will have to explain to their voters what they are doing to get one.

    As Iraqis know, the main killers in Iraq are not the insurgents but the Americans. The Iraqi ministry of health's latest statistics show that in the last six months of 2004 they killed almost three times as many people as the insurgents did. On this issue, just as on the elections, TV images usually simplify, if not falsify, the story.

    © 2005 Guardian Newspapers, Ltd.
     

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