Citizens beware! Can you prove that you are not Guilty?

[kpete]

The Burden of Proof - Cheney

"Although our coalition has not found WMD stockpiles in Iraq, I repeat that we never had the burden of proof. Saddam Hussein did. We operated on the best available intelligence gathered over a period of years and within a totalitarian society ruled by fear and secret police," Cheney said. Reuter

Breathtaking in its boldness!

Let's see! WE asserted on the basis of bogus and distorted information that Iraq was in non-compliance with a variety of UN resolutions calling on Iraq to disarm. A few trenchant points:

-The UN had withdrawn its inspectors from the country in '98 at our instigation because we were going to bomb extensively in an attempt to trigger a revolt. Fair enough, but the point is that the IRAQIS did not run the inspectors out of the country.


- The Iraqis were asked during the UN inspection process to produce an inventory of whatever they had in the way of WMD materiel. They produced a long list which was proven correct by our later direct search of the country. Nevertheless, we insisted at the time that the list was incomplete and deliberately deceptive because some quantities of parts and raw materials that our intelligence had once believed them to have were "unaccounted for" by the UN's inspection teams in the '90s and were still "unaccounted for" in this inventory. This PROVED that they were hiding a secret capability in WMD. In fact, it did not prove a damned thing. This was a 3RD WORLD COUNTRY, people!. Nothing works right in 3rd World Countries and the fact that they couldn't do a perfect paper drill on all that stuff just meant that they were inefficient. The UN was in the process of proving that when we abandoned the process claiming they were deceiving us.

Now the Vice President says that the "burden of proof" lay with the Iraqi government. In other words it was their responsibility to prove to us that they did not have gas, biological or nuclear weapons or programs to produce them. They were unable to do that, because these capabilities and programs DID NOT EXIST.

So, citizens beware! It may become your responsibility to prove that you are not guilty of treason, sedition, being a malcontent, or whatever.

Can you prove that you are not?

Pat Lang

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N21272539.htm

[Dr.Phool]

1. Rule of logic #1

You can't prove a negative. I don't have a gun. But I can't prove that. If I said I had a gun I could prove it.

The burden of proof is always on the person making the assertion. I am an atheist. I don't believe that a God exists, but I can't prove that one doesn't exist. So, therefore, I cannot make the assertion that God does not exist. The believer, on the other hand, since he is asserting that there is a God, has the burden of proof.

Just 2 examples of the rules of logic that Cheney is trying to violate.