"President Must Answer to Downing Street Memo"

Sorry folks, there are no "unlawful combattants".

Sure, that argument can be made. And similarly I can then argue that
there are no unlawful victors.

If Joe is the King and wants Tom in jail, Tom is going to have a bad day.

The executive commands the military, and so if the military detains
someone on foreign soil, by force, then they will also have a bad day. I
suppose pretending that there is a legal solution to every political
question makes it easier for weak minds to generate a Usenet thread.

While they're at it, committee and counsel should
look deeper into the Columbia tragedy, and at long last,
open a [prejudiced, paranoid, and plain kooky]
Challenger investigation.

Boring Lunatic

"OM" om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote
in message news
On Sun, 19 Jun 2005 04:26:36 GMT, Scott Lowther
wrote:

That is why it is called the War of Northern Aggression.

Only by those who don't correctly refer to it as the War of Southern
Aggression.

...*Both* sides were the aggressors when you get down to the core of
the matter. That's why the correct name is the War Betwixt the States.


My God, I'm going to have to agere with OM here. Something's wrong with the
fabric of the universe.



OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

George William Herbert wrote:
Pat Flannery wrote:

In the US someone would FOIA the originals and we'd see.

Not so fast, George! Surely you take us for fools!

The NY Times "FOIA[ed]" the Challenger crew's voice tapes, but we've
never "see[n]" (or heard) an authentic (certified) FOIA copy of them.

I could cite enough other examples (from Mission 51-L alone) to bore
most readers.

Challenger's Ghost

rk wrote:

Why would anyone destroy the originals for such a hot topic?

From below, to protect the sources. How would a memorandum
identify the source?

There are all sorts of possibilities. As you suggest, the
source might be identified in a distribution list. Or the
documents might be numbered. (This is copy M of N.) Or there
might be identifying marginal notes. Or the source might fear
that HMG would seize the documents from the reporter (that happens
in the UK -- remember the Morrison case) and send them to
a forensics lab to see if fingerprints or even DNA might be found.

As George says, if they are fakes vs copies, the truth will
probably out pretty rapidly.

(And no, this isn't really a space-like topic.)

Scott M. Kozel wrote:


Read your history. Slavery was not the reason that unionists started
the war,

No, but it was the reason why the SOuth started the war. Read some of
the southern state constitutions. They are quite clear.

Pat Flannery wrote:


Reed Snellenberger wrote:


Unless additional copies of the original memos can be produced, or
their original author(s) are identified and required to testify as to
their being a true copy of any presumed memo(s) he may have written,
they should be treated as forgeries and ignored.


The memos mention meetings involving specific persons at which specific
things were discussed:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlates...083737,00.html
The people mentioned include :


What memos?

We don't have any independent evidence that there *ever* were any memos
-- all we have are the retyped "copies" of "memos" that were purportedly
received by the reporter and then destroyed. As far as I know, they
weren't even shown to anyone else before they were destroyed (his
editor? Another reporter?)

Perhaps you feel certain enough of the reporter's honesty that you'll
accept his claim (that his documents are an accurate transcription of
copies of some "official" memos that he received) at face value.

I don't.

Reed
--
I was punching a text message into my | Reed Snellenberger
phone yesterday and thought, "they need | GPG KeyID: 5A978843
to make a phone that you can just talk | rsnellenberger
into." Major Thomb | -at-houston.rr.com

George William Herbert wrote:

I certainly await further clarification. Though suspicious,
I don't have any sort of factual evidence in front of me proving
they were forgeries. But that sort of thing, once it starts
to unravel, tends to come all the way apart rapidly. So we
should find out for real in the next week or two.


When you say that you need "evidence in front of me proving they were
forgeries", you're making the Challenger mistake.

In that case, the Thiokol engineers were asked to prove that the
boosters would be unsafe (rather than everyone else proving that they
would be safe).

In this case, "we" are being asked to prove that the documents are
fakes, when the proper obligation is on the reporter to prove that the
documents are genuine.

The Killian scandal would NEVER have been uncovered if CBS hadn't placed
the "original" documents on-line so that they could be analyzed by font
and other experts in the blogging community.


--
I was punching a text message into my | Reed Snellenberger
phone yesterday and thought, "they need | GPG KeyID: 5A978843
to make a phone that you can just talk | rsnellenberger
into." Major Thomb | -at-houston.rr.com

And this has what, exactly, to do with space?

On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 21:59:24 -0500, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

Part of the blame lies with those in Gitmo- if they want to fall under the
Geneva Convention, then they need to follow the rules as well, part of which
calls for fighting while wearing clearly identified *uniforms*.


I doubt if they have access to any in Afghanistan at least.
On the uniform front the "uniforms" worn by a lot of the Confederate
forces during the Civil War were highly nonstanderdized to say the
least; they just tried to avoid wearing anything blue for safety's sake.

Yeah, those damned Johnnie Rebs, ignoring those Geneva Protocols that
hadn't been invented yet...

You do realize, don't you, that many in that war fighting out of
uniform were summarily shot as spies?