John Nielsen-Gammon: Skeptics Are Not Deniers

joeldshore says:
July 12, 2012 at 6:21 pm
Bill Tuttle says: “They do when they use that taxpayer-funded server to send e-mails, regardless of the content.”
No…They do not.
Good luck arguing that POV in court. If it’s on a publicly-funded server, it’s public property unless it’s been classified. From the DC FOIA (which mirrors the US FOIA):

http://www.rcfp.org/category/open-government-guide-table-contents/r1/r1c/r1c1?page=4
What is it about the term “whistleblower” that seems to escape you so?
“Whistleblower” laws are designed to protect people who report things that they perceive as abuses through proper channels, not to protect people who take the law into their own hands. In certain cases, self-styled “whistleblowers” have felt strongly enough to take things into their own hands (Pentagon papers, Wikileaks) but in that case these people have to recognize that what they are doing is likely not legal, may be prosecutable, and must be prepared to face the consequences.
Daniel Ellesberg and Bradley Manning were not charged with theft of public documents, they were charged with the unauthorized release of *classified* documents to the general public. Bottom line is that anyone using a publicly-funded server has *no* right to expect a :right to privacy.”
Gotta scoot for now — day job, and all that…

joeldshore says:
July 12, 2012 at 6:21 pm
Bill Tuttle says: “Good point. It seems they just quietly gave up on it because they couldn’t find any evidence that the server was hacked.”
That is not even what is claimed on the biased websites that you cite as sources. All that is said is that the investigation is inactive. There are many reasons why an investigation runs dry…It doesn’t mean that they have no evidence that the server was hacked. They may have excellent evidence of that but can’t trace who did it. I am not saying that is the case…but it is as possible interpretation as yours. The difference is that I am not presenting it as if it were the only interpretation.
The usual procedure in the event that they have evidence, but no leads, is to release an official statement that “the investigation is ongoing.” If they have no evidence, they usually put it into the Cold Case file.
As for the WMD stuff, despite Kurth Weldon’s attempt to put lipstick on a pig even George Bush admitted that we didn’t find WMD there in any reasonable sense of the word.
Interesting that you guys spent eight years claiming “Bush lied” and then you pull out a Bush quote to “prove” there were no WMDs in Iraq. And you must have a very exclusive definition of “reasonable” —

WASHINGTON, June 29, 2006 – The 500 munitions discovered throughout Iraq since 2003 and discussed in a National Ground Intelligence Center report meet the criteria of weapons of mass destruction, the center’s commander said here today.
“These are chemical weapons as defined under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and yes … they do constitute weapons of mass destruction,” Army Col. John Chu told the House Armed Services Committee.

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=15918

Citing the United Nations resolutions that called for destruction of all of Hussein’s banned weapons, Hunter added that “the verified existence of such chemical weapons” proves they were not destroyed and “in part because of such violations, we voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/30/AR2006063001528.html
From your U-Toob link, it’s clear that Bush was referring to Saddam’s nuclear program. Did we find any nukes? No.

Several hundred chemical weapons were found, and Saddam had all his WMD scientists and technicians ready. Just end the sanctions and add money, and the weapons would be back in production within a year. At the time of the invasion, all intelligence agencies, world-wide, believed Saddam still had a functioning WMD program. Saddam had shut them down because of the cost, but created the illusion that the program was still operating in order to fool the Iranians.

http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/topten/articles/20070128.aspx
And, your link to a story about the yellowcake in no way implies that this was ADDITIONAL yellowcake to what Saddam was known to already possess, which is what the Plame/Wilson thing involved.
I didn’t say it did. What I *did* say was that there’s fifty metric tons of yellowcake unaccounted for, and we found the centrifuges which Saddam was using to enrich it – the same exact make and model the Iranians were using until Stuxnet ate them up.
“Eight years of Bill Clinton reduced the size of the military to the point where we wouldn’t have had the number of boots on the ground we needed to guard everything in Iraq even if we’d sent everyone we had in uniform. We didn’t win Gulf II with the Clinton military, we won it with what remained of the Reagan military.”
Frankly, that is a bunch of partisan nonsense.
Frankly, I find that amusing, coming from an armchair academic with no military background.
They seemed to have no trouble finding the necessary soldiers to secure the oil fields in special operations (I believe some even before hostilities officially commenced or at least in the very early hours.)
The SF lads were securing the airfields and the surrounding buildings within direct-fire range. The oilfields themselves were bypassed, not secured, because a good part of them were on fire.
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/burning-oil-wells-signal-that-iraq-is-on-retreat/77524/1
The oilfields weren’t secured until civilian contract security teams moved in along with the firefighters, months later – the military had its hands full being a police force in the main cities.
If they were really so constrained by the state of the military that they couldn’t find the troops to secure a facility where it was known for a fact that Saddam had high-grade conventional explosives that could be used for nuclear weapons (since they had been locked and tagged as such by the UAE), then they shouldn’t have gone in at all.
You made the assumption that Saddam had all his eggs in one basket. He didn’t – he had small arsenals and dispersed facilities to make them more difficult to target during the Deny Flight years. Read some history books.
If the purpose of my mission is to prevent WMD from getting into the hands of terrorists, I have the CIA telling me that a control freak like Saddam is very unlikely to give up control of WMD to terrorists (particularly those who have such a stellar record of turning on their former allies as Bin Laden!), and I don’t think I have the necessary troops to secure facilities where there are most likely to be WMD so that they can’t be looted…
First you said that Saddam just had *a* facility and now you’re multiplying them to fit your narrative. And there were several other reasons (which you’re rather conveniently ignoring) for going into Iraq.
…by any poverty-stricken Iraqi that can commandeer a truck and then sold on the black market, then it is pretty much a no-brainer of whether or not I choose to go to war!
Cheney admitted he underestimated the number of troops they’d need for peacekeeping. That was a residue of believing the DoS-centric view that the mere presence of US troops would automatically ensure stability. The realization that the striped-pants set didn’t know what it was talking about and they’d need more boots on the ground was the reason for the Surge.
Which worked.

Ooops. Credible source #3 slipped through the cut’n’paste process (just in case you have a quibble about my citing WUWT or BH as a credible source) —

In a statement, Deputy Information Commissioner Graham Smith said it was an offence under section 77 of the Freedom of Information act “to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information”
He said the requests were made by a climate change sceptic in the 2007-2008 period and as the case was more than six months old “the opportunity to consider a prosecution was long gone” under existing legislation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8484385.stm