On Mon, 24 May 2004 15:29:15 -0400, "Kevin Brooks"
wrote:

You conveniently missed the PICTURE that showed the rocket launchers,

There are no slides (that I can see, anyway) with the transcript at
http://www.dod.mil/transcripts/2004/...0524-0793.html. And oh, yes,
if there's an RPG it must involve insurgents. After all, who else in a
law-abiding country like Iraq would own an RPG?

And all of those *Sudanese* attendants..heck of along way to travel for a
wedding in those parts...

Why so? People travel all over the Middle East: Sudanese (and not
Muslims, but Nuer and Dinka from the south) were an important element
in the construction force in Yemen and Jordan for quite some time. Do
you actually think that, after the degree of smuggling tolerated by
all sides (even America, in Kurdistan) during Saddam's rule, movement
of peopel an dgoods has just stopped?

(This has been your pet peeve, right?
The alleged butchering of children?)

Quite a bit of it, yes. (They found no children being killed... except
of course for all of those people who say that children were killed.
But hell, they're only Iraqis, right?) But more generally than that
the idea that in occupied Iraq (or Afghanistan) the best procedure in
such a case is simply to bomb the hell out of the place and then ask
questions and stonewall later. Because what Kimmitt is making clear is
that he _doesn't know what that meeting was_. Here he is again, from
the section of the transcript that you quoted:

...our post-strike analysis suggests that what we had was a
significant foreign-fighter waystation, smuggler waystation in the middle of
the desert ...

and he's treating them as if they were the same thing. But as far as I
know being a smuggler in Iraq is not supposed to automatically bring a
sentence of Death From On High. Still less attending a wedding.

Scott