Irish fighter captured in Iraq

boardy

Back to topic ......

The Irish citizen may not be a freckled faced fisherman. He may be one of these boys:

Mohamed Meguerba, an Algerian whose parents lived in Belgium, came to Dublin in 1997 and lived here for four years, marrying an Irish woman.

Security officials pointed out that this was one of the methods used by Jihadis to obtain Irish citizenship.

From the Independent today.

cal29

Earthman wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_legislative_election,_2005

58% was the figure I was thinking of.
I doubt that US soldiers were standing over those voters making them vote in the way that they did.

I'm always skeptical of posts discounting democratic votes.
I understand tyhe Iraqi Govt is now opening talks with the insurgents.

Well even if we accept the figure of 58% i believe that is less that 60%+

and a couple of Quotes from the link you just gave

Small groups of protesters around the world marched in support of the boycott of the Iraq elections and against the U.S. occupation of Iraq. They claim that for an Iraqi election to have meaning the U.S. should not be "orchestrating the process". [3]

Scott Ritter has alleged that the U.S. has partially rigged the election to reduce the percentage won by the United Iraqi Alliance from 56% to 48%. No evidence has been provided to support these allegations.

It proved impossible to find monitors that would actually monitor the election from within the country. Rather the IMIE observers were based in Amman, Jordan and monitored the election from there. There were also representatives in Baghdad, generally the staff in the embassies of the IMIE nations. The absentee poll held in fourteen countries around the world were monitored by a wide array of IGO and NGOs, but these groups were unwilling to monitor the election in Iraq itself.

It is highly unusual to base the monitoring team outside of the country where the election is being held, but the observers decided this was necessary for safety reasons. Among other security precautions all but the head of the mission, Canadian Jean-Pierre Kingsley remained anonymous. The main burden on monitoring the election thus fell to Iraqi representatives on the ground who sent reports to Amman. The majority of these volunteers were some 35,000 partisan scrutineers representing the parties competing in the election. Another 21,000 non-partisan volunteers were recruited by a variety of agencies and NGOs. [6] The observers assert that despite the unusual circumstances the election was adequately monitored. Others disagree arguing that the IMIE was created to rubber stamp the U.S. created elections

Sponge Bob

Yer man who was caught was the l33T LVF suicide squad .

cal29

Earthman wrote:

Except modding is not a right it's an ability and a job.I dont do it because it's my right.
.

I never said modding was a right what I said was that as a moderator you have the right to ban people I recognise that right exists I do not have to agree with how you exercise that right

it was merely an example of how recognising a right and disagreeing with its exercise are not incompatible as you had suggested they were

cal29

cal29 wrote:

Well even if we accept the figure of 58% i believe that is less that 60%+

If you want to be picky yes.
If I wanted to be pedantic I'd say within a margin of error.

and a couple of Quotes from the link you just gave

Ok I get your point there,you're suggesting that there could have been widespread fraud as there was no proper monitoring of the election.
Unless you can point to this widespread fraud, I'd say its conjecture to say so tbh.

I never said modding was a right what I said was that as a moderator you have the right to ban people I recognise that right exists I do not have to agree with how you exercise that right

But it's not an unequivocal right its just an ability as part of a mods job, the same as killing someone is not a right either.
There are laws that govern it in both cases to determine whether it is actually a right.
Insurgents wouldnt like to subject themselves to that type of restriction though.Of course you are perfectly entitled to the view that Bush et al didnt want to subject themselves to that type of restriction either when they invaded Iraq.
I'd have a long and interesting discussion with you on that topic, but in another thread.
Now can we agree to somewhat disagree on some things here and agree on others so we can actually get back on topic

And more importantly I can get to the pub

Memnoch

a few things...

as I remember the figure was not 58-60% of iraqis, but rather 58-60% of REGISTERED voters, god knows how many of the iraqi's were even registered. But that qualification was increasingly omitted when this figure has been banded about time and time again. People just stopped quoting the registered part because without it the figure actually sounds representative.

There was nothing democratic about those "elections". They are about as democratic as they were under Saddam's rule. They were conducted and supervised by a foreign occupying power with only it's own interests in mind. Each and every step of the election process could have been tampered with at any stage.

The entire process was an unbroken chain, the invaders APPOINTED the temporary government body (their puppets) who conducted these so called elections.

There were no independent observers present and all information that people quote in order to "prove" that this process was somehow democratic sites information put out by the coalition which can be considered no more than propaganda.

Earthman's post claiming this is a democratic process is a conspiracy theory.

P.S. the right to defend yourself allows you to kill someone if you believe they will kill you. In the case of nations it is legal for them to defend themselves from aggression. Off course legal and illegal are dodgy words in the international community where the rules are written by people with power to serve by and large their own interests and where these rules can be ignored if it is convenient for said powers.

For rock climber and Earthman, I have a question. If you do both abhor violence as you so claim, do you then recognize the invasion of iraq as being wrong completely and utterly since the coalition murdered countless iraqis by dropping bombs on them? Or does the "accidental" killing not count?

I again reiterate, I don't believe violence solves anything, because violence begets more violence. I do believe however that many Iraqi's may think that they don't have much choice. The democratic process that has been mentioned here has been a sham, there can never be democracy while things are run by an invading force that is only looking out for it's own greed.

I also would like to reiterate that the term "insurgent" as a misnomer. It is not possible to group all the iraqi forces under a single such umbrella. There could easily be hundreds of different factions present and this kind of oversimplification only shows the weakness of the arguement.

2nd edit:

I know people will ask for a link so here it is...
http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/10/15/iraq.main/

according to the above 15.5 million out of iraqi's 26 million were registered to vote and only 60% of those 15.5 turned up, which at a rough calculation makes about 8 million people. Please NOTE that this is the new vote on iraqi constitution, the number of "registered" voters have gone up greatly since the first "general election".

I find it interesting how in both elections voter turnout turned to be around 60% of registered voters. I'd say that's probably the minimum number required to convince people who want to be convinced about the legitmacy of the project

So IF we take ALL off the figures provided by the coalition at face value.. (why would they lie???????!?!?!?!?!?!11111 or hey they couldn't possibly be mistaken???????? I mean the coalition can't count the number of iraqis they killed, but they can count the number of voters accurately, off course they can!) we can see that less than 1 third of Iraqi's took part in this so called process by the coalitions OWN figures which are almost certainly highly inflated.

I'd say the reality was more like 5 million or so people who turned up for this farce of an election. And god only knows how many of these were probably forced into it since anyone with a food card had to register. Hey, no registration, no food for your family, you have a right to refuse though, completely democratic all the way!

And all this before we even get into a question of how these candidates for the election were chosen in the first place, lest we forget that the US had a veto on that also!

Memnoch

Memnoch wrote:

according to the above 15.5 million out of iraqi's 26 million were registered to vote and only 60% of those 15.5 turned up, which at a rough calculation makes about 8 million people.

Yeah thats right they should have registered the rest ot them, the people under 18 right down to week old babies :rolleyes:
By that reckoning we should have 4 million registered voters in Ireland-what next give the vote to the unborn aswell ?

If you do both abhor violence as you so claim, do you then recognize the invasion of iraq as being wrong completely and utterly since the coalition murdered countless iraqis by dropping bombs on them? Or does the "accidental" killing not count?

Ah the old look over there for a distraction to avoid being awkwardly caught out argument.
Doesnt wash I'm afraid.
I'll abhor all killing by the way and I wont be a hypocrite about it thanks.
I don't care who did the killing or why.I will accept a legal process'es judgement on a killing however eg if a DPP decides not to prosecute for good reason or a court doesnt convict.
You on the other hand will feign your outrage at one sides killing whilst condoning the other sides which is the very essence of hypocrisy.

Memnoch

Memnoch wrote:

Earthman's post claiming this is a democratic process is a conspiracy theory.

Ha Ha
That looks like a weak humoured reference to your objection to my moving a conspiracy theory thread to well... the conspiracy theories board and your pm to me calling on me to resign from the moderation of this board.

You don't know the definition of conspiracy theory that well do you?
Please keep your opinions on moderation where they belong and thats not off topic on a thread about an insurgent who has Irish citizenship.

Now I will say this only once more If this thread doesnt go back on topic fairly sharpish-I'm closing it.