Baghdad wants U.S. to pay $1 billion for damage to city

I was a child at the time of 9/11 so I don't owe them anything at all.

Originally posted by zerbot565
i can bet you that u.s has more political prisinors then any other country at the moment

Nah, I'm willing to bet that China and North Korea probably have plenty more than the US.

I vote we give them two billion now and two billion more next month, in US dollars of course. If we pay them in $100 bills they could use it for toilet paper. Oh yeah, while we are at it send them some stock in one of America's big banks.

Originally posted by ProtoplasmicTraveler
Actually it's pretty clear that the intelligent posters are aware that I am talking about the broader war on terror including Afghanistan with Baghdad and the Iraq conflict just being a part of that. When people use the infrastructure argument, something that has been going on in part since the end of World War II and the Marshall Plan it opens up the conversation for honest posters to speak about a wider range of issues that are part of the problems regarding the out of control military industrial complex and their often brain dead and anal retentive supporters, who if you don't draw a map for them have a hard time following along in intelligent discourse.

Fuuny, the topic of discussions is Baghdad wanting a billion dollars for damage to their city. Try sticking to that and taking the Yak arguments to another thread. Seems pretty clear to me and most other intelligent posters on ATS.

Originally posted by ProtoplasmicTraveler
The roads prior to the invansion based on fraudelent intelligence were in fact in adequate working order, and there were many more Iraqis going to work then as fewer of them were in the cemeteries and grave yards before we indiscriminately started murdering men, women, children, reporters, etc.

Yet the roads per say aren't even what the money is being requested for, but the environmental damage in general caused by a calous army of occupiers indifferent to the plight of others, as most murderers of men, women, children and reporters tend to be.

Another off topic attempt at deflection. And most of the sheep on ATS tend to bleet that exact same line when it comes to the war in Iraq.

Originally posted by ProtoplasmicTraveler
Improve for whom the pork barrel recipients of the contracts, Iraq is in fact number 5 on the failed state's list, pre-earthquake Haiti was more developed and nicer, so it would seem the billions being wasted are being wasted.

Pre-earthquake Haiti was more developed and nicer? Haven't been there, have you?

Originally posted by ProtoplasmicTraveler
I made no mistake, and clearly have broadened the argument to encompass those who were broadening it through the deceptive we improve infrastructure arguments for the benefit of the people.

But as I said I expected such a response from those desperate enough to promote failed arguments they have to travel around in little forum gangs from one site to another.

Most of the people who are honestly following along are able to actually partake in a broadened argument that sheds light then on narrower specifics, of course except for those engaged in the propaganda wars who prefer topics be limited to narrow talking points that they imagine favor their arguments, that in reality the only people who do star are in the organized gang promoting them.

The infrastructure arguments are false ones, what ever infrastructure improvements are made are made for the benefit of the occupiers and their corporate appendages.

Thanks for being so wonderfully predictable!

Thanks for being so wonderfully predictable, Proto. You really do know how to be the mouthpiece for the uninformed anti-war collection of individuals on ATS.

Oh, well, another desperate attempt at deflection. Lame arguments and cheap shots masquerading as an intelligent discussion. Once again, you are showing your complete and utter lack of knowledge on the war in Iraq and A-stan and the US military.

And yaks. Can't forgot those. Hey, Proto, what's this?

"Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp, bang, clomp, clomp, clomp."

A drive by shooting on yak-back. Damn, I crack myself up sometimes.

Like Ron Paul said, we are blowing up bridges in Iraq while ours are falling down.

Yes, we bombed their country to hell and back... under false pretenses. Iraq was formerly a country were there was no terrorism (they killed terrorists and ruled them with an iron fist), now, it is the breeding ground for them.

Thank you USA foreign policy. EPIC FAIL!

Please watch this brief tour de force video and share it. If the US voter realizes there is no difference between the parties then maybe we can get Ron Paul elected and end this perpetual wars (on "terror", drugs, education, porn, immigration, etc).

www.youtube.com...

reply to post by FreakyDeaky1

No, we didn't blow up Iraqi bridges under false pretenses.

We blew bridges up to : A. Keep forces bottlenecked from escaping
B. Prevent reinforcements.

No false pretenses. We knew exactly what we were doing.

reply to post by jerico65

Another off topic attempt at deflection. And most of the sheep on ATS tend to bleet that exact same line when it comes to the war in Iraq.

Nice, this is what the murderers who play dress up and kill innocent men, women and children for shiny ribbons on their cheap made in China jackets, think about the people who's name they are pretending to act out their adolescent fantasies for...sheep?

Yeah you keep yakking my friend, I pretty much count on the vile mannerisms of the neanderthals to display their one dimensional limitations and how much they care about the world and what they really care about the world.

You sir do your kind justice!

reply to post by FarArcher

Now Proto, you don't want to get into it with me.

Still not potty trained, I see?

Don't worry I promise not to drop you off anywhere near those naughty section 8 people, who just don't understand the 'value' in killing everyone and everything not like you.

I'll keep the window open, I am pretty used to the smell around here already.

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler

Well, that's just not nice. You are getting a bit sensitive and simultaneously cranky in your advanced age. Seems anyone who disagrees with your views are Neanderthals.

I'll take it.

Wasn't very creative, but I've been called much, much worse.

Let me pose a question: What kind of retarded thinking even permits a person to THINK that US forces willfully, intentionally, and deliberately target women and children?

I have a clue: someone so far removed from common-sense reality - and so deeply submersed in theoretical rhetoric and lack of personal knowledge - that they are parrots.

Want to repeat some of that crap you've heard and learned by rote again?

You are violating the first rule of BS'g. Never start believing your own BS.

reply to post by FarArcher


Hey it might be ALL those trials were service men are charged with murdering civilians, even keeping parts of their bodies as trophies, after conspiring to rape, murder, and often sell drugs with one another.

Oh and conspiring to physically beat and or murder any service member who exposes them.

Read the news much any?

As far as for the remote control drone pilots in Langley, let's just say when it comes to their ethics, there is nothing to say at all.

Members of a squad of about 10 American soldiers are under investigation for murdering at least three local villagers who had angered them. According to the allegations, this is not a case of civilians being mistaken for Taliban fighters and not a one-time moment of rage.

www.cbsnews.com...

Just one of many examples.

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler

Now Proto, you're suggesting I don't watch any news is just not an accurate depiction, and I would urge you to spread your interest around and see what's actually going on in the world.

All over the world, young men are full of themselves, and you have a few that just can't help themselves as their assholeishness just gets the best of them, and they do something unbelievably stupid.

You won't believe this, but a small portion of young men actually commit rape. Some even murder, rob, roll, break-in, and this part is the kicker - some actually steal. !!!!

So if on occasion, we see a culture of young men, put in some really crappy situations, where everyone is armed, many are trying to kill them, don't you just find it astounding that on occasion, one will resort to this type of stupidity?

Heaven forbid that anyone paint a large group with the same brush.

Like today, maybe thirty folks got killed in the US with firearms. That's bad. But simultaneously, some 33,000,000 armed Americans killed no one.

See how that works?

About those drones. You track patterns, and then you track individuals and small groups. If they go into a structure, you can utilize the blast effect of walls to intensify the concussion effect of high explosive, and more efficiently delete them from your problem list.

So you do. You blow the building.

Maybe there are women and children inside.

The blood of these innocents is NOT on the one who tracked and pulled the trigger.

The blood of the innocents is the ones who put them at risk, who endangered them, knowing they themselves are hunted, and those who would allow these types of men into their homes.

So easy to take one narrow, half-blind side of something.

Life is more of a two-edged sword.

Cuts both ways.

reply to post by FarArcher


Sorry my friend, I was studying military history and doctrine while you were just a gleam in someone's eye.

If you have a poor command and control structure, poor superior officers, and mentally unfit people in your command, then that's what you have.

Sure it's fun to see you try to explain it away, right after you claimed it never happens, yet it's a very under reported thing as soldiers in the field have to think twice about ratting out a buddy who might not only not have their back in a critical confrontation but might just frag them in the back instead if given half the chance if they break the code of silence.

You asked where people get the idea that soldiers are purposefully targeting civilians, like the normal excuses of incompetence really make those mistakes caused by poor intelligence in 'target poor' enivornments seem like a good enough reason to drop a payload.

I have told you, where people get the idea.

While you travel around in a little wolf pack meant to target specific posters and threads to make it seem like the war mongerers of the world rule the day.

The only thing you rule is the excuses you are constantly having to try to pull out of your hat to justify a little thing you are too morally bankrupt to understand.

It's called murder, institutionalized murder by the state.

In reality there is seldom if ever an excuse for it, and when it comes to people who live 11,000 miles away and at best have a few small arms, there is no excuse for it all, let alone to the tune of hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

No wonder a select band of criminals and the criminally minded don't want to see that gravy train end.

Go figure.

The chart below is external content but I couldn't enclose it otherwise it would have been all on one line. Anyway I figured I would throw some information out that is just from the Iraq war not including Afghanistan.

Year Civilian deaths

2003 12,079
2004 10,834
2005 15,034
2006 27,850
2007 24,677
2008 9,245
2009 4,681
2010 3,576

Concerning the yearly totals, IBC project states: "All figures are taken from the "maximum" confirmed deaths in the IBC database. However, IBC's rates and counts will rise over the coming months, as data is still being added to the IBC database for 2006 and other periods covered here." The IBC project released a report detailing the deaths it recorded between March 2003 and March 2005 in which it recorded 24,865 civilian deaths. The report says the U.S. and its allies were responsible for the largest share (37%) of the 24,865 deaths. The remaining deaths were attributed to anti-occupations forces (9%), crime (36%) and unknown agents (11%).

We can see from the portion of text below how crime could be a factor in the civilian deaths as caused by people being displaced.

As of November 4, 2006, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that 1.8 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighboring countries, and 1.6 million were displaced internally, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing to Syria and Jordan each month. As of 2007 more Iraqis had lost their homes and become refugees than the population of any other country. Over 3.9 million people, close to 16 percent of the Iraqi population, have become uprooted. Of these, around 2 million have fled Iraq and flooded other countries, and 1.9 million are estimated to be refugees inside Iraq. Roughly 40 percent of Iraq's middle class is believed to have fled, the U.N. said. Most are fleeing systematic persecution and have no desire to return

en.wikipedia.org...

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000 Wednesday, October 11, 2006

A man mourns his son Friday in Baqubah, a city north of Baghdad. The child died in random gunfire near a family home in the village of Khan Bani Saad. (By Mohammed Adnan -- Associated Press)

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government. It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group. The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups.

www.washingtonpost.com...

Iraq Body Count is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s largest public database of violent civilian deaths during and since the 2003 invasion. The count encompasses non-combatants killed by military or paramilitary action and the breakdown in civil security following the invasion. Data is drawn from cross-checked media reports, hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures to produce a credible record of known deaths and incidents.

Documented civilian deaths from violence 99,712 – 108,865

www.iraqbodycount.org...

Originally posted by ProtoplasmicTraveler
Sorry my friend, I was studying military history and doctrine while you were just a gleam in someone's eye.

Wow, studying it, huh? That's fantasitc. Too bad you really don't seem to have a grip about the military. Guess all that studying has gone to waste.

Trust me, actually being in combat is a lot different than studying it. Not that you'll ever find out.

Originally posted by signal2noise

Originally posted by ProtoplasmicTraveler
Sorry my friend, I was studying military history and doctrine while you were just a gleam in someone's eye.

Wow, studying it, huh? That's fantasitc. Too bad you really don't seem to have a grip about the military. Guess all that studying has gone to waste.

Trust me, actually being in combat is a lot different than studying it. Not that you'll ever find out.

This, apparently coming from someone who HAS served...are you not just as biased?

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler

Well Proto, as anyone knows, there's a big difference between studying fornicating and doing it.

Big difference. They teach sex in schools, but it's just not with the same understanding as ones who've been there, done that, worked on their skills, and actually know all the "ins and outs."

About that killing you mentioned? You see, here's where your study has failed you.

In war, it's all killing.

You're either on the giving end, or the receiving end. Since time began.

I assure you, it's much better to give than receive.