[lbo-talk] Re: A War to Be Proud Of (when you drunk and deluded)

[John Mage]

Kelley, evidently in a better mood (the effect on emotional stability of
being threatened with a lawsuit, let alone being hit with one, is
always massive - lawyers who bring incompetent harassing lawsuits should
be strangled in the entrails of shock-therapy self-dealing
fraudster neoliberal academic economists), posted this latest
from Hitchens:

 > A War to Be Proud Of From the September 5 / September 12, 2005 issue:

 >  The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is

 > the administration tongue-tied? by Christopher Hitchens 09/05/2005,

 > Volume 010, Issue 47

 >

 > LET ME BEGIN WITH A simple sentence that, even as I write it, appears

 >  less than Swiftian in the modesty of its proposal: "Prison

 > conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically

 > since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad."

 >

 > I could undertake to defend that statement against any member of

 > Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, and I know in advance

 > that none of them could challenge it, let alone negate it. Before

 > March 2003, Abu Ghraib was an abattoir, a torture chamber, and a

 > concentration camp. Now, and not without reason, it is an

 > international byword for Yankee imperialism and sadism. Yet the

 > improvement is still, unarguably, the difference between night and

 > day. How is it possible that the advocates of a post-Saddam Iraq have

 >  been placed on the defensive in this manner? And where should one

 > begin?

With the truth.
When the US-UK Coalition troops arrived in Baghdad, the prisons had been
empty for about 5 months.
<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50E1EFB34590C728EDDA90994DA404482>

john mage