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-- The Blood Of Heroes
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quote:

Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.

donald rumsfeld meet with suddam hussein, why havent you invaded and bombed his home?

quote:

Originally posted by Michael19 donald rumsfeld meet with suddam hussein, why havent you invaded and bombed his home?

did you know what was going on back then?
how old were you?
do you know who they were at war with back then?
did you fall for some anti-war propaganda and not use context and your own logic?

http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/30/sp....regime.change/

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo did you know what was going on back then? how old were you? do you know who they were at war with back then? did you fall for some anti-war propaganda and not use context and your own logic? http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/30/sp....regime.change/

your hardly one to talk aobut falling for propaganda to be fair. Do you have any actual evidence of links between iraqi and al qaeda?


alot of the sutff you posts with links, had a lot of "believed to be" and "according to". Seems to be a load of shite. I dont believe Hussein had major links with al qaeda.

they used it as another excuse to invade, like the WMD.

what do you consider convincing evidence?

he needed to be taken down. if your not convinced of that yet then i can't help you. you don't want to be helped.

your nice and cozy where you are. and your in a position to question anything and everything that that you see with absolutely no fallout or risk. meanwhile over a thousand soldiers have died and over a thousand iraqi civilians have died at the hands of really bad people.

its a luxury afforded by youth i guess.

information coming from a non-biased source, and not the likes of the american goverment, or sources with ties to the goverment.

quote:

* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002...ain510795.shtml 1. * Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003. 2. * Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum. * Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell. * An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. http://www.washtimes.com/national/2...23723-4738r.htm http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utili...378&R=798D1B52B * In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ht...inattack15.html * In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1157764/posts (Why are all of those meetings significant? The London Observer reports that FBI investigators cite a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan, which "emphasizes the value of conducting discussions about pending terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.") * As recently as 2001, Iraq's embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi dictator and al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. * Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's Independent reports. * An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col. Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq.'" * In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. *The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989. * Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network. * In 2001, an al Qaeda member "bragged that the situation in Iraq was 'good,'" according to intelligence made public by Mr. Powell. * That same year, Saudi Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the kingdom from Iraq. * Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq. *Zarqawi met with military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources cited by the Washington Post. * Mohammad Atef, the head of al Qaeda's military wing until the U.S. killed him in Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody that the terror network needed labs outside of Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons, Mr. Powell said. "Where did they go, where did they look?" said the secretary. "They went to Iraq." * Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times between 1997 and 2000. He called his relationship with Saddam's regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations. * Mohamed Mansour Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May, 2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a reporter for the New Yorker magazine. * Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" to be established in Baghdad. * Mullah Melan Krekar, ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials. His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of $300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad." * After October 2001, hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq. Some skeptics dismiss the emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and al Qaeda by contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists like bin Laden

i'm getting lazy

and whats the point of re-posting that?


all the links seem to be American based, again, not excatly the most reliable place to get unbiased information from

http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docid=203

kinda old. circa '99 http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,314700,00.html

new separate issue
http://www.nationalreview.com/comme...00404182336.asp
http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/A1515_0_2_0_C/
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Conte...03/527uwabl.asp
http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/co...ullstory.asp?id

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo new separate issue http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/A1515_0_2_0_C/

quote:

She quotes financial investigators as saying there are possible "terrorist connections" in the list of companies doing business under the oil-for-food program. She says they include "a remnant of the defunct global criminal bank, BCCI; another was close to the Taliban while Osama bin Laden was on the rise in Afghanistan; a third was linked to a bank in the Bahamas involved in al Qaeda's financial network; a fourth had a close connection to one of Saddam's would-be nuclear-bomb makers."

BCCI... hmm... BCCI... oh, now i remember

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/

(please note who busted those thugs)

didn't BCCI help finance arbusto as well? well fuck! if we're following the money trail and bombing as we go, shouldn't we denounce a president that personally benefited from the organizations in question?

quote:

your nice and cozy where you are. and your in a position to question anything and everything that that you see with absolutely no fallout or risk. meanwhile over a thousand soldiers have died and over a thousand iraqi civilians have died at the hands of really bad people.

and yet you still support those people. or did i take that out of context? and BTW, i'm not speaking of the enlisted men serving their duty, i'm referring to our "leadership".

I'm getting tired of these continued rejustifications for our actions in Iraq. There's the basic announced premise for our invasion, or has that been forgotten? I remember seeing Powell pointing at satellite photos of trucks and believing him when he said it was one of a gazillion chemical weapon production sites in Iraq. Hell, he was going to fire those things on us. That's why we needed the pre-emptive strike. Fool me once...

And yet we still have citizens embracing the grasped straws of this administration. Some people have so much emotionally invested in bush to allow for reasonable thoughts of our own wrongdoing. They ignore the patriots of this country and call them un-american propogandists.

Simply put, we fucked up. My eyes are not clouded by the tears i cried on 9/11, and i'm sorry that so much hate is being perpetuated by people calling themselves americans.

And please don't post anymore links to articles about the whos who of iraq and terrorism without first studying them at a level above the shallow need for self-righteous justifications of an emotional attachment. There's more to every story.

quote:

Originally posted by ResonantDrag BCCI... hmm... BCCI... oh, now i remember didn't BCCI help finance arbusto as well? well fuck! if we're following the money trail and bombing as we go, shouldn't we denounce a president that personally benefited from the organizations in question?

now who's grasping at straws

quote:

and yet you still support those people. or did i take that out of context? and BTW, i'm not speaking of the enlisted men serving their duty, i'm referring to our "leadership". I'm getting tired of these continued rejustifications for our actions in Iraq. There's the basic announced premise for our invasion, or has that been forgotten? I remember seeing Powell pointing at satellite photos of trucks and believing him when he said it was one of a gazillion chemical weapon production sites in Iraq. Hell, he was going to fire those things on us. That's why we needed the pre-emptive strike. Fool me once... And yet we still have citizens embracing the grasped straws of this administration. Some people have so much emotionally invested in bush to allow for reasonable thoughts of our own wrongdoing. They ignore the patriots of this country and call them un-american propogandists. Simply put, we fucked up. My eyes are not clouded by the tears i cried on 9/11, and i'm sorry that so much hate is being perpetuated by people calling themselves americans. And please don't post anymore links to articles about the whos who of iraq and terrorism without first studying them at a level above the shallow need for self-righteous justifications of an emotional attachment. There's more to every story.

i don't feel i'm grasping at straws. i believe there is a real fight going on. and i'm not ashamed to admit it. i'm not afraid to defend this country's actions. i don't think you were fooled as much as the world was and has, so far, proven by the blood of soldiers. i believe there is a larger picture at stake, than just Iraq. that cannot be fucked up any more than pacifism towards the violence pepetuated on this country many times before 9/11. i'll never be pacified by a terrorist. if it requires more of an emotional attachment, then so be it.

then don't confuse your feelings for logic

too late

that's sad

and following your guilt by association platform..

http://www.campaignwatch.org/more1.htm

i know, it's not in the 9/11 report, so we can't take it too seriously.

http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/Book10Ch.7.html

http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/sep2...004/oped/o4.htm

okay, so the new popular justification for invading iraq is that there is a financial connection between saddam and bin laden. yet these same financial ties bring together our president's family with saddam and bin laden.

is propoganda what brings this evidence together, or is it what is used to make us ignore branches of the same tree?

but our president didn't buy chemical weapons with his illegal funds. he didn't gas millions of his own people. what he did do was use his family connections to sieze power and change fiscal policies to allow for companies like enron to bankrupt california.

http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmc...alifCrisis.html

good 'ol kennie boy. thanks for the contributions. now don't get caught. shit, ken who?

Dubya did the exact same kind of insider trading that lay was guilty of when Bush sold out of Harken eight months after the federal deadline for insider trading.

http://www.buzzflash.com/perspectives/bush_harken.html

The same group of people who claim that moral integrity is important in the oval office when refering to blow jobs say that the greater evil must be fought by Bush, regardless of his scruples.

I say that the morality of our leadership reflects upon us in our attempts to conduct foreign policy and fight a war against terror. If we're led by crooks, the world will see us as a nation of crooks. How can we win a war on terror on that platform?

I don't feel that electing a new administration will make us any more susceptible to acts of terrorism than we already are. In fact, i would even wager that if we remove these unprosecuted criminals from office, we may even earn some respect back as being the model of freedom and democracy in the world. Take that Osama!

quote:

Originally posted by ResonantDrag and following your guilt by association platform..

all i can say to this is start another thread.

quote:

i know, it's not in the 9/11 report, so we can't take it too seriously. [URL=http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/Book10Ch.7.html]http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/Book10Ch.7.html http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/sep2...004/oped/o4.htm

well , your right its not the 9/11 commission report but any fool can post garbage on the web. It takes an even bigger fool to actually use it and convince others its true.

quote:

okay, so the new popular justification for invading iraq is that there is a financial connection between saddam and bin laden. yet these same financial ties bring together our president's family with saddam and bin laden. is propoganda what brings this evidence together, or is it what is used to make us ignore branches of the same tree?

in truth, it's oil that links all of these parties together. from Bush's vague and benevolent ties. to Osama's psychotic and hereditary ties. but i really don't think Bath's $50,000 stake in Arbusto in '77 can justify anything more than a coincidence.

quote:

what he did do was use his family connections to sieze power and change fiscal policies to allow for companies like enron to bankrupt california.

WOW! now thats more than reaching. thats almost liable.

quote:

good 'ol kennie boy. thanks for the contributions. now don't get caught. shit, ken who? Dubya did the exact same kind of insider trading that lay was guilty of when Bush sold out of Harken eight months after the federal deadline for insider trading.

The real story http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york071002.asp

quote:

The calls for SEC disclosure are the latest tactic in the Democrats' attempt to tie Bush to the issue of "corporate greed." While such statements are intended to suggest that Bush is covering up his role in the Harken matter, they ignore one important fact: There are already many SEC documents about Harken available to the public. The documents deal with the critical issues raised by Bush's stock sale, and they reveal the reasoning behind the SEC investigators' decision not to take any action against Bush or Harken. A close review of the documents supports statements made by the president and answers most, if not all, of the questions raised by his Democratic critics. Together with other publicly available information on Bush's business career, they suggest that Bush was correct when he told the press that as far as Harken is concerned, "there's no there"

quote:

http://www.buzzflash.com/perspectives/bush_harken.html The same group of people who claim that moral integrity is important in the oval office when refering to blow jobs say that the greater evil must be fought by Bush, regardless of his scruples. I say that the morality of our leadership reflects upon us in our attempts to conduct foreign policy and fight a war against terror. If we're led by crooks, the world will see us as a nation of crooks. How can we win a war on terror on that platform? I don't feel that electing a new administration will make us any more susceptible to acts of terrorism than we already are. In fact, i would even wager that if we remove these unprosecuted criminals from office, we may even earn some respect back as being the model of freedom and democracy in the world. Take that Osama!

i believe that morality should reflect upon us also, in the face of our leadership. i believe it has since 2000. but i also believe that this president has been torn down and villified every step of the way because of his nature and background regardless of whether he made $800,000 as a three time failed Texas oil man. he's been demonized and lied about because there is a political party that had an agenda during the Clinton years to bring this country closer to the European model and they feel they were robbed and put on hold as a result of the 2000 election and they have been doing everything in their power to regain not only the office but every majority in government that they have lost fair and square.

ask yourself which one is it? is Bush the maniacle mad genius that personally orchestrated the war on terror by using his ties with the Saudi's and the Bin Laden family to kill thousands of people all over the world and monopolize the world oil market more than it already is within the window of opputunity before the inevitable OPEC turndown 20 yrs. from now?
or is he bumbling illiterate fool that has no integrity and wants to destroy the American dream?
IMO if you have to think about it...then neither are true.

Oh pity poor George W. Bush, I'll remember to shed tears for him . His policies, his approach to foreign policy and his arrogance in dealing with others is his ticket to international hatred. George Bush is the victim of no one, I so often like to remind others that I was a supporter of him, indepth examination of the issues has led me to believe he caters to a grouping that I do not care for guiding this nation aka NEOCONS. You can put your sense of trust in a President and also lose that sense of trust for innumerable reasons, George W. Bush has given me plenty to lose trust in him, starting with WMDs or lack thereof, a reason which I will never let down when it comes to the Iraq war, thus my vocal critic.

quote:

Originally posted by NYCTrancefan Oh pity poor George W. Bush, I'll remember to shed tears for him . His policies, his approach to foreign policy and his arrogance in dealing with others is his ticket to international hatred. George Bush is the victim of no one, I so often like to remind others that I was a supporter of him, indepth examination of the issues has led me to believe he caters to a grouping that I do not care for guiding this nation aka NEOCONS. You can put your sense of trust in a President and also lose that sense of trust for innumerable reasons, George W. Bush has given me plenty to lose trust in him, starting with WMDs or lack thereof, a reason which I will never let down when it comes to the Iraq war, thus my vocal critic.

i got a question for ya.

if Bush knew the WMD's were not gonna be there, why didn't he just have some planted? just the mere fact that we haven't found any, rejects the notion that he lied about it.

if all of these soldiers had to die for what you said the war was all about (which it wasn't) and all the bullshit he should have known he'd have to put up with, knowing what the French and the Brits and the Russians knew, why didn't he just plant some. anything

that sounds like something the George Bush some of you guys are describing would do.

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo i got a question for ya. if Bush knew the WMD's were not gonna be there, why didn't he just have some planted?

no shit. and according to our Bush haters here, he's lied before right?
so why didn't he plant the WMD's there, in his favor?

man the USA will be in trouble if Kerry gets into office, but I guess we don't have to worry. No grassroots liberal movement will undermine the conservative viewpoint and morale. People care about the tasks at hand, and the tasks is one that the majority of American people don't think Kerry can handle.

>JM<

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo all i can say to this is start another thread.

sorry, i'm having too much fun in this one

quote:

well , your right its not the 9/11 commission report but any fool can post garbage on the web. It takes an even bigger fool to actually use it and convince others its true.

thanks for proving your point

quote:

in truth, it's oil that links all of these parties together. from Bush's vague and benevolent ties. to Osama's psychotic and hereditary ties. but i really don't think Bath's $50,000 stake in Arbusto in '77 can justify anything more than a coincidence.

i was just giving an example of another coincidence that compromises your belief system. You did in fact state that you believed that funds gathered by saddam were used to finance terrorist organizations, didn't you? or was that just a poor reaching example? sorry if i seem confused by your ability to ignore some evidence while embracing other evidence. please tell me how to filter reality as a good god-fearing bush supporter. then we'll be on the same page (i may need a frontal lobotomy as well).

quote:

WOW! now thats more than reaching. thats almost liable.

well, let's play a little game called connect the dots. have a pen ready? never mind, i'll keep it nice and simple for you.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/artic.../08/LAYBUSH.TMP

quote:

It won't be easy for the president to ignore his ties to Lay, who has been a friend and supporter of the Bush family for years. Lay was co-chairman of President George H.W. Bush's 1992 re-election campaign and was a leading fund-raiser for the current president's 2000 campaign. Enron and its executives contributed more than $3 million to GOP causes between 1998 and 2002

okay, now i'm going to make an assumtion that they were friends. now stay with me.

kenneth lay now is given the opportunity to help draft a new energy policy.

now, this stuff wasn't in the state of the union address, so you may not have heard about it. that's okay, here's some little snips of what actually happened.

http://www.ucan.org/law_policy/energydocs/bushed.htm

quote:

California, Oregon and Washington were told, in diplomatic but clear terms, that the Bush administration will not offer any meaningful assistance with its short-term energy problems. None of the help needed by the state was offered by the President. For example, temporary price caps were not mentioned. Mandatory requirements that generators sell power were not offered. Financial relief was not proposed.

now, what's a temporary price cap?

http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/temporary

quote:

Temporary: 1. [adj] lacking continuity or regularity; "an irregular worker"; "employed on a temporary basis" 2. [adj] not permanent; not lasting; "politics is an impermanent factor of life"- James Thurber; "impermanent palm cottages"; "a temperary arrangement"; "temporary housing"

okay, i'll stop with the belittling remarks, so stay with me.

a temporary price cap is something that the government can impose to protect consumers when demand begins to reach a point where the price of a good begins to skyrocket. an small example would be protecting victims of a hurricane from people who think they can get $100 for a bag of ice. in this particular case, it's not hurricane victims, rather the government of the state of california. The bags of ice is electricity. still with me? good.

now the citizens actually had regulated price caps on electricity (we all do, that's what keeps my bills within reason). so let's get to the meat on how california still owes money due to our president's buddies' policies.

http://powermarketers.netcontentinc...gt%3EEvbfej%5B!

quote:

Is it an outrage or is it fair play? That's the question Californians and the rest of the nation are asking in light of the fact that federal regulators have ruled that the state of California owes energy companies about $270 million for overpriced power that it procured and sold during the energy crisis of 2000-2001. It's not likely that the refunds will be forthcoming for at least a while. That's because California's policymakers plan to keep the demands set by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission tied up in court. While many of the state's citizens say that the requirement is laughable, regulators and other power marketing groups say that because the state bought and sold power at that time, it too must comply with the same pricing restrictions that were placed on them. In a motion filed with the commission, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer says that regulators have insulted the state and the ruling would compensate �the sellers a second time for their market manipulation activities and predatory pricing.� FERC has already said California is due about $3 billion in refunds but the state has only received about $100 million to date. California continues to assert that the amount should total $9 billion. FERC found in 2003 that the market had been seriously gamed. It therefore set a limit for what electricity should have cost. It then ordered sellers, or power marketers, to refund any amount over that benchmark. The state bought power and is entitled to refunds. It also sold power to the California Independent System Operator (ISO). But the price of the power the state sold to the ISO exceeded the FERC-set limit and therefore California is supposed to refund the difference. �No one is exempt,� says Gary Ackerman, executive director of the Western Power Trading Forum, in an interview with Dow Jones. The refunds are upsetting enough to most Californians, but the intended recipients�notably Enron�of any such refunds are even more appalling, they say. The list: Enron is owed $23 million; Reliant is due $33.7 million; Williams has $25 million coming; Mirant is owed $26.7 million; Duke is to get $33.2 million and Dynegy is owed $16 million. Most of the state's power was purchased for San Diego Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. Resuscitate Investment The issue of settlements is just another subcomponent of how the California experiment with deregulation could have gone so wrong. Who is to blame is debatable. But, according to federal regulators who studied the issue at length, it is a combination of poor regulation and crooked traders. Those with ill intent were able to capitalize on supply shortfalls and a fatally flawed market design that had curtailed power generation development and required utilities to buy from volatile spot markets. Meanwhile, regulators had capped prices to consumers, which left the state's utilities unable to recoup all of their costs, which skyrocketed with exorbitant wholesale prices. By insulating customers with fixed prices the situation was further exasperated because there was no price signal encouraging customers to conserve during high price periods. Both FERC and California regulators understand the need to resuscitate the level of investment in infrastructure there. Policymakers also know that killing off the suppliers will not aid in the goal to build more generators, pipelines and wires. At the same time, they are under pressure to uncover wrongdoing and extract justice. Some traders have pled guilty to wire fraud and others are under investigation. Additionally, companies have admitted to �round trip� trades that were intended to inflate volume and drive up short term prices, forcing some of them to pay fines, enter settlement talks and fire workers. The overall abuse is apparent to California regulators, who say that they are dismayed that FERC cannot connect the dots and force the renegotiation of long-term contracts as well as award them greater damages. �FERC is increasing what had been a high burden of proof for consumers to an extraordinarily high, amazing burden of proof,� says Eric Saltmarsh, attorney for the California Electricity Oversight Board in an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune. �We believe this is a real misapplication of the law.� Others, meanwhile, acknowledge that unethical traders manipulated prices but still place most of the fault on regulators. Take Enron's "Ricochet" strategy, which could not be repeated in most formal markets that involve independent system operators and regional transmission organizations, says Brett Kruse, an energy analyst in Houston. They have "capacity markets" that compensate generators for availability, and require them to economically make power available to their day-ahead energy markets. The PJM Interconnection, for example, has the ability to curtail system exports from generators that are considered "capacity resources" during high peak periods. �California chose not to learn from successful systems like PJM when they designed their market, and the results are what they are,� says Kruse. The discussion will go on. And, the immediate subject is just whether the state of California ought to refund $270 million to power marketers that actually helped create the crisis. It's likely that the roar now being heard at the thought of that will overpower the demands to give the money back.

so if california believes it is owed $9 billion, that isn't exactly helping them get out of debt, now is it?

quote:

The real story

yep

quote:

i believe that morality should reflect upon us also, in the face of our leadership. i believe it has since 2000. but i also believe that this president has been torn down and villified every step of the way because of his nature and background regardless of whether he made $800,000 as a three time failed Texas oil man. he's been demonized and lied about because there is a political party that had an agenda during the Clinton years to bring this country closer to the European model and they feel they were robbed and put on hold as a result of the 2000 election and they have been doing everything in their power to regain not only the office but every majority in government that they have lost fair and square.

laughable

quote:

ask yourself which one is it? is Bush the maniacle mad genius that personally orchestrated the war on terror by using his ties with the Saudi's and the Bin Laden family to kill thousands of people all over the world and monopolize the world oil market more than it already is within the window of opputunity before the inevitable OPEC turndown 20 yrs. from now? or is he bumbling illiterate fool that has no integrity and wants to destroy the American dream? IMO if you have to think about it...then neither are true.

ask yourself. is bush a post turtle placed by people with enough verbal eloquence to convince enough morons to vote for the "good 'ol straight talker"? IMO if you think about it, it is true.

delete

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo your not a real good debater are you?

And you're not a very good punctuator, are you?


Honestly though, while you don't appear to be able to refute many of the facts laid forth here in regards to Bush and the current administration, you do seem very proficient in your ambiguity.

Do you truly agree with everything that Bush and Company stands for? I just can't fathom how ANYONE (besides his sycophants) could consider Dubya to be so beyond reproach.

ahhh, done with classes and i feel refreshed.

i wonder what the political fallout would be if it were discovered that WMDs were planted in Iraq? probably worse than no WMDs at all IMO.

sorry if my debate abilities aren't up to par. i'm still struggling with how one describes colors to a blind man. maybe i should have created a new thread, but the page one propoganda just happened to rub me in that very special way. maybe if i'm given a bit more practice, i'll be able to improve. but as trancer-x pointed out, you do see inable to refute the fact that we're led by crooks, so maybe some small part of me is on the right track. I do thank you for your time, and hope that i can continue to improve myself with your help.

if you would like to continue this one, i would recommend staying away from trying to protect the character of Bush and co. maybe you could tell me how kerry would allow attacks on our soil by eliminating funding for homeland security. or how he could fuck up things anymore than dubya has. or how if one doesn't support fascist leadership one must be a socialist.

again, thanks for your patience

no, i'm at work

i'm still tying to decipher this statement

quote:

what he did do was use his family connections to sieze power and change fiscal policies to allow for companies like enron to bankrupt california.

its way, waaay out there. and typical of a liberal blame shift. (i don't think most Californians would buy it.)

feel honored that i actually took it seriously and asked a guy i work with who lived in California up until this year. he looked at me like i was nuts and started going off on Gray Davis for 10 minutes.

i've never lived in California but this crap is for the birds.

as for the rest of my statements, address them and get on with it.

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