Units of Horror

[East Coast Hustle]

The US told the first responders the air was perfectly fine to breathe.

900 of them have died. This was not a terrorist act, it was the US. Then those people were abandoned to foot all the medical bills.

answer honestly: If the first responders had been told that the air was NOT OK, how many of them do you think would have waited for respirators before they went in to look for survivors and try to get them out?

I like to think I wouldn't have.

[Adios]

The US told the first responders the air was perfectly fine to breathe.

900 of them have died. This was not a terrorist act, it was the US. Then those people were abandoned to foot all the medical bills.

answer honestly: If the first responders had been told that the air was NOT OK, how many of them do you think would have waited for respirators before they went in to look for survivors and try to get them out?

I like to think I wouldn't have.

I can't answer honestly, because I just don't know. I have seen how people suffer from breathing bad shit like this. It is horrible.

[Doktor Howl]

The US told the first responders the air was perfectly fine to breathe.

900 of them have died. This was not a terrorist act, it was the US. Then those people were abandoned to foot all the medical bills.

answer honestly: If the first responders had been told that the air was NOT OK, how many of them do you think would have waited for respirators before they went in to look for survivors and try to get them out?

I like to think I wouldn't have.

I'd like to think I'd be given a chance to make an educated choice.

[Doktor Howl]

If I wasn't so bogged down right now I would start a thread about the 50 biggest lies the US Gov't has told this decade.

What "government"?  Oh, yeah.  You and I and everyone we know.

[Adios]

The US told the first responders the air was perfectly fine to breathe.

900 of them have died. This was not a terrorist act, it was the US. Then those people were abandoned to foot all the medical bills.

answer honestly: If the first responders had been told that the air was NOT OK, how many of them do you think would have waited for respirators before they went in to look for survivors and try to get them out?

I like to think I wouldn't have.

I'd like to think I'd be given a chance to make an educated choice.

I would have expected to have been taken care of afterward as well, which I am sure they did.

[Adios]

If I wasn't so bogged down right now I would start a thread about the 50 biggest lies the US Gov't has told this decade.

What "government"?  Oh, yeah.  You and I and everyone we know.

Me? On! No! I am a shut-out. I have no idea what they are doing, and if I try to probe, well, off to the camps.

Besides, it's like peeling an onion, there's always another layer, the core is unattainable, because when you think it's the last layer then it's all gone.

[Cain]

I'm certainly not arguing that point, I'm just saying I was talking about things that took place all at once. I don't know how many people we whacked at Mai Lai (counts, since Vietnam was never a declared war), but I'm pretty sure it was short of 3,000.

Okay.  I'm counting what we've done in total.

Also, a half-million civilian casualties is the highest figure I've heard for Iraq, and certainly not from sources I consider reliable. I don't think there are any of those as far as Iraq is concerned. Perhaps I'm spending too much time around government scumbags, perhaps not, but just because one side is nothing but lies and propaganda doesn't mean the other side is anything less.

I was counting all casualties, from the initial invasion to the present, military and civilian.

I know, I'm just disputing that there have been a half-million people killed in Iraq since we invaded. If you have anything resembling a reliable source for that number I'm willing to reconsider.

IIRC, Cain has posted some numbers, and I've seen anything from 30,000 to 2 million civilians.  Obviously, both the high and low numbers are partisan bullshit, but if you include the Iraqi military, 500,000 is pretty reasonable.  I can't do much searching from this comp, though, so I will retract those numbers until I can get to my laptop.

The Lancet study suggests near 600,000 additional deaths (including those dying from lack of medical treatment, due to power cuts, in the lawlessness which followed the immediate invasion etc), but I know it's methodology was questioned (and counter-asserted...repeatedly), so I'm not sure I trust it.  Most estimates put civilian casualties between 95,000-110,000 since the occupation began.  Roughly 12,000 Iraqi soldiers and security forces have snuffed it since then.  1300 contractors.  

The US military doesn't "do" bodycounts (when it is winning), so we don't know how many Iraqi soldiers died during the invasion.  Gen Tommy Franks claims 30,000, but that sounds like bullshit to me.  The Project on Defense Alternatives at Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts gives us the more reasonable estimate of somewhere between 7,600 and 10,800 Iraqi combatant and civilian fatalities during the war itself.

Adding that up, plus throwing in 4000 odd US troops, we get a conservative estimate of about 120,000, given I rounded down a few of these numbers to the nearest thousand.

[Doktor Howl]

Thank you, Cain.

[Cain]

No problem.  If anyone does have a strong opinion on the Lancet report though, I'd like them to say so.  It just seems too contested for me to include, currently, and I don't want the headache of sorting through the statistical and methodological aspects of the damn thing to figure out the truth.  I'm open to being persuaded either way, I guess I'm saying.

[the last yatto]

to elaborate, I'm not sure why mass murder on an unprecedented scale in modern American history is either "happy" or reason for lulz.

Actually I disagree, I think its time for celebration like those three mossad agents* found about as far away as the new ground zero mosque. I wish brown to be right that it becomes a day to be something bigger then just one person one act, fuck one anything. For better or worse someone about as crazy as the Manson family attacked this country and its was like pearl harbor all over again but instead of some rising sun to be able to point at as some enemy well we have only our own shadows. Its not like we didn't know it wasn't just a drill, most laughted off y2k but there was some divine like warning the millennium* something bad was going to happen. Who knew? Some say we should have saw it coming when the top FBI agent in charge of counter terrorist let his briefcase get stolen just prior to the attacks*. Top secret files lost in the wind like it was a missing child on the side of a milk carton and only thing that happened was one man fired. But to tell you the truth some people did see this coming and made a shit ton of money from it. Even better some are attempting to use it to make tea and revolution but all its really doing is allowing themselves to be tarred and feathered

Yeah it sucked people died, but it sucks more THAT it takes a wrestler for people to find out the real reason the blackbox is missing* is because the pilots were speaking Arabic just after the plane took off. Maybe this is why NORAD really didn't fly out to greet the hijackers in time, as maybe they thought they were dealing with a ransom not a Kamikaze pilot.

Eta. Fixed grammer and added footnotes

[Adios]

I think it's time to put this shit to bed.

[Phox]

What the fuck is this shit?! Seriously?