Syria

King Of Twilight said:
LooseCannon - if Saddam had no more WMD by 1996, then what was Clinton bombing as Congress met to impeach him?
I still remember the split screens on TV that day...
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2 reasons. 1 - Saddam had refused to allow inspectors, because he said they found everything (which the UN reports pretty much agreed with). 2 - Clinton got his cock sucked by an intern and wanted you to watch the fireworks.

King Of Twilight said:
We may never know if Saddam still had WMD. We know he had operational facilities still. We also know there was a lot of transport activity at his suspected facilities just before the invasion. If the cops stand at the door long enough threatening to bust in, the suspect is going to flush the evidence. Bush foolishly gave Saddam a year. A lot can be flushed in a year.
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None of this is true. The weapons that were found in Iraq after had all been buried since the Iran-Iraq War - UN teams inspected Iraq, remember, in 2003 and Hans Blix was quite sure Iraq had no capabilities, though he admitted that they could put facilities together in a few months. Some small stuff were destroyed (decaying canisters that had been uncovered) and this is all documented by UNSCOM. You can't just flush chemical weapons - you have to bury it or blow it up. It's just...there were no WMD of note. There were no facilities. Period. Fact. Final.

King Of Twilight said:
So now when Syria says "we have no chemical weapons," and Russia says "yup, it's true, we checked," then what?
Because that is what's coming next.
You bought that Saddam didn't. Will you buy that Assad doesn't, too?
Or will you say "he's lying, let's bomb!"? That's what Bush did, too.
And when the smoke clears, there won't be any more evidence in Syria than there was in Iraq.
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Well, my thoughts are two-fold. 1) if Syria signs the treaty (which Russia is saying is a mandatory aspect to this solution) then if they maintain or use chemical weapons again, we really can intervene and we will have international law on our side. 2) International weapons inspectors do a very good job at what they do. I believe in them. My whole concern from the moment I heard of a gas attack was that the world would do nothing and people would just keep dropping VX or Sarin when they saw fit in Syria. We could have the casualties bloom. I've wanted to intervene since the war started, but I understand why NATO hasn't. Anyway, whatevs, I'm done with this topic.
 
Perun said:
More like, "If you drop Assad, we'll look away when Gazprom rips off Naftogaz and we will forget whatever we heard about the Ukraine wanting to join the NATO." That's how deals are made.
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You know, considering what's happening in the Ukraine right now, and considering that no American bomb has been dropped on Syria, I have the uncanny feeling that I was not entirely totally wrong on this.
 
Huh. I see no compromise, Russia remained hard-line on her opinions about both Syria and Ukraine. The current Ukranian protests are raging because of Russia's hard stance.
 
Just one of thousands of victims, one who would stay til the end, and did stay til his own end.

He stayed on even as some 1,400 people were evacuated from the city during a UN-supervised operation earlier this year. A Jesuit, Mr Van der Lugt arrived in Syria in 1966 after spending two years in Lebanon studying Arabic. He lived in a Jesuit monastery, where he ministered to the area's remaining Christians and tried to help poor families.

"I don't see people as Muslims or Christian, I see a human being first and foremost," he told reporters.

His call for help

"Christians and Muslims are going through a difficult and painful time and we are faced with many problems. The greatest of these is hunger. People have nothing to eat. There is nothing more painful than watching mothers searching for food for children in the streets...I will not accept that we die of hunger. I do not accept that we drown in a sea of hunger, letting the waves of death drag us under. We love life, we want to live. And we do not want to sink in a sea of pain and suffering."

earlier this year impressed me (as did many other calls by many other people), and now he is dead as well. Executed with two shots in the head.

It's going to continue, on and on...
 
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I just read that Bashar al-Assad received 88.7 percent of the votes in the presidential election. Wonder who the last 1/8 voted for ...
 
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That's just a stock picture from AP, maybe they didn't have an appropriate picture handy to illustrate the article with.
 
Dr. Eddies Wingman said:
Well, strictly speaking it could be RAF pilots flying USAF planes ;)
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USN. Strike fighter squadron 87.
Three pilots and 17 other active personnel of RAF are working with Americans and French. These are three transport pilots.
You can't just jump into F-18 and fly away on bomb spree. Even Eurofighter/Tornado pilots would need tens of hours of training to pull out such a stunt.

Perun said:
That's just a stock picture from AP, maybe they didn't have an appropriate picture handy to illustrate the article with.
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No picture is better than the wrong picture.
 
Zare said:
No picture is better than the wrong picture.
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Pictures are required for all web news stories on news media websites, partly because the layout is set up to require it and partly because research shows stories without pictures are ignored. That's why you see so many generic pictures of police cordon tape and emergency vehicles.
 
Well I won't argue with that. General population is dumb.
Layout is a non-argument because if your layout can't handle article without a picture then you should definitely fire your web designer.

This just shows level of professionalism and commitment to your work.
I'm not buying into this AP stock pictures. AP has tons of stock pictures, they could've used another one. Hercules would be okay.

Why am I ranting? I usually see a story, and it's tied to something that I'm involved with (e.g. working with and have been academically educated for the field), and the complete story is nonsense. There are syntactical mistakes, overall incomprehension of the matter by article author, wrong data, wrong media to go with it, etc. The story is targeted towards "general audience". Why should I believe that media outlet when they speak about anything else, if they allow such level of unprofessional behaviour among their ranks, regardless of the topic?
 
I was refering to a page layout that depends on having a picture in a certain place or it will screw up article formatting, and I think Brigantium was speaking of a same thing.
 
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