I need help responding to this e-mail.

[chitty]

My freeper friend sent me this e-mail this morning and he's coming over for Thanksgiving dinner. I'm sure he's going to bring it up when he gets here so any help debunking this would be wonderful.

Here it is.

Of course I didn't know. How could I?

Did you know that 47 countries have reestablished their embassies in Iraq?

Did you know that the Iraqi government currently employs 1.2 million Iraqi people?

Did you know that 3100 schools have been renovated, 364 schools are under rehabilitation, 263 schools are now under construction and 38 new schools have been built in Iraq?

Did you know that Iraq's higher educational structure consists of 20 Universities, 46 Institutes or colleges and 4 research centers, all currently operating?



Did you know that 25 Iraq students departed for the United States in January 2005 for the re-established Fulbright program?



Did you know that the Iraqi Navy is operational?! They have 5- 100-foot patrol craft, 34 smaller vessels and a naval infantry regiment.



Did you know that Iraq's Air Force consists of three operational squadrons, which includes 9 reconnaissance and 3 US C-130 transport

aircraft (under Iraqi operational control) which operate day and night, and will soon add 16 UH-1 helicopters and 4 Bell Jet Rangers?



Did you know that Iraq has a counter-terrorist unit and a Commando Battalion?



Did you know that the Iraqi Police Service has over 55,000 fully trained and equipped police officers?



Did you know that there are 5 Police Academies in Iraq that produce over 3500 new officers each 8 weeks?



Did you know there are more than 1100 building projects going on in Iraq? They include 364 schools, 67 public clinics, 15 hospitals, 83 railroad stations, 22 oil facilities, 93 water facilities and 69 electrical facilities.



Did you know that 96% of Iraqi children under the age of 5 have received the first 2 series of polio vaccinations?


Did you know that 4.3 million Iraqi children were enrolled in primary school by mid October?


Did you know that there are 1,192,000 cell phone subscribers in Iraq and phone use has gone up 158%?


Did you know that Iraq has an independent media that consists of 75 radio stations, 180 newspapers and 10 television stations?


Did you know that the Baghdad Stock Exchange opened in June of 2004?


Did you know that 2 candidates in the Iraqi presidential election had a televised debate recently?



OF COURSE WE DIDN'T KNOW!


WHY DIDN'T WE KNOW? OUR MEDIA WOULDN'T TELL US!


Instead of reflecting our love for our country, we get photos of flag burning incidents at Abu Ghraib and people throwing snowballs at the presidential motorcades.


The lack of accentuating the positive in Iraq serves two purposes.

It is intended to undermine the world's perception of the United States

thus minimizing consequent support, and it is intended to discourage American citizens.



---- Above facts are verifiable on the Department of Defense web

site.

.......Pass it on!

[wryter2000]

1. Try this

So, why in hell can't our troops come home if everything's so fabulous there?

[Road Scholar]

14. AMEN BROTHER!!!!! nt

[serryjw]

22. That is the perfect response

...add to it a thread I just started

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5445770

[wryter2000]

31. Is that the right thread?

Doesn't seem as if my post would fit there. Or do you have one about answering freepers?

[serryjw]

35. Yes,

do you have one about answering freepers?

Besides the obvious greed....THEY think they are doing their patriotic duty to help us continue to have 'our way of life'

[Andrea]

2. Yeah, Department of Defense website,

Now there's a credible source. Thank goodness we can always count on Rumsfeld and his team to be straight shooters. :sarcasm: off

Seriously, people that believe that stuff have no interest in the facts. Good luck, but I think your friend is hopeless.

[MercutioATC]

3. "Did you know that Iraq had all of this before we got there?"

Iraq was no third-world nation. They were a highly industrialized, culturally wealthy country. It's silly to crow about having children in school and a working stock exchange when the only reason they ever STOPPED working it because we bombed them.

(oh, and cellphone use is up because we can't keep the landlines working)

[Solomon]

29. Exactly. Most americans are very ignorant about Iraq before we

screwed it up.

[Thirtieschild]

34. ABSOLUTELY

The ignorance in this country is astounding, but maybe not surprising given the quality of information we get.

[skipos]

4. Look at this link to Snopes (a great site)

http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/combatend.asp

[Gormy Cuss]

5. Always check snopes.com first

In this case, they refer to an Iraqi's account of life after the American invasion.
http://vitw.org/archives/174

[mark11727]

6. I HATE emails that start fifty freakin' sentence with "did you know..."

...as though the recipient was some kind of UNINFORMED MORON.

Just ONCE I'd like to reply with...

"DID YOU KNOW THAT I'VE ALREADY DELETED THIS AND REPORTED YOUR EMAIL AS SPAM?"

Happy Thanksgiving, Chitty! :hi:

[wryter2000]

32. Good one!

Part of the problem with many freeper forwards is they're so damned long. If the person sent one or two Did you know's, you could research it and give them a dose of truth. The only possible response is a global one like many posted here. I love the vacation comment.

[LiberalFighter]

7. Is he going to take a vacation to Iraq?

[Mz Pip]

8. Snopes refers to this

This is a rebuttal by an actual Iraqi.

http://vitw.org/archives/174

Mz Pip

:dem:

[NewJeffCT]

20. great rebuttal

i need to bookmark that one

[Whoa_Nelly]

25. And the Home Page has more

for up-to-date info

http://vitw.org/

[ellenfl]

9. tell him that snopes has seen this circulating since 2003 and

give him the url . . . Snopes.

then ask him why our troops are still there since these accomplishments have been in place since 2003.

ellen fl

{edit} lol, you guys beat me to snopes! i should not have stopped to read the links.

[whalerider55]

10. or this...

things really suck in (fill in the country). when do we send American troops in their to fight for their right to have cell phones?

Why have "terrorost attacks" increased from 40 to literally more than 500 a week now if things are going so well in Iraq? Is it all really "outside" terrorists infiltrating Iraq, or are we in the middle of a civil war?

Does the Department of Defense website talk about the office of Doug Feith, and the lies and patheitc analysis of data they stovepiped to Dick Cheney to get us into the war?

Does it catalog the weapons of mass destruction that rumsfield and cheney guarenteed were there, the ones 2000 american soldiers died for?

aside from a "democratic" election that was boycotted by a third of the electorate, a presidential "race" in which america's handpicked, oil-pimping candidate was heavily favored, a debate in which no-one outside the green zone could see because there is no electricity on a regular basis, and a consstititution that looks a lot more like ran's than ours, what other measures of democracy does the defense department want us to look at?

the graduation of police from academies who head out the back door as soon the guns are fired?

a military that is increasingly made up of exactly the same personnel that we fought during the invasion, welcomed back simply to keep them and their weapons out of the insurgency?

tell your friend you value your freindship, and if he/she wants to keep, not to bring up this subject while you have a knife in your hand carving a turkey.

whalerider

[MsConduct]

11. Dept of Defense??? Has he ever heard of propaganda?

I could give a rip about Iraq, what about our country?

[LiberalFighter]

12. Embassies in Iraq??

How many of those countries have staff stationed in Iraq?

[LiberalFighter]

13. Rebuttals

[LiberalFighter]

17. Iraqi Police Service

Global Security

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on September 15, 2004, Joseph Bowab, deputy assistant secretary of State for foreign assistance programs and budget, acknowledged that none of the 32,000 Iraqi Officers put in place since the downfall of Saddam Hussein's Regime had completed a full training program.

Knight Ridder Newspapers reported on Oct. 23, 2004, that the Iraqi Interim Government had been conducting a purge of the Iraqi Police Service over the previous months, and removing a number of officers from its payrolls for either corruption, lack of qualifications or for failing altogether to show up for duty while still receiving pay. As a result, while the IPS was believed to be standing at a 91,000 strength as of May 2004, revised numbers put the number of Iraqi police officers closer to 40,000.

The Formidable Job of Training Iraq's Problem-Plagued Police

There is scant praise for Iraq's Police Service in a 101-page report published last month by the Inspectors General for the U.S. departments of State and Defence. The interagency assessment of Iraq's police training stated, amongst its dozens of judgments and recommendations, that "too many recruits are marginally literate; some show up for training with criminal records or physical handicaps; and some recruits allegedly are infiltrating insurgents."

It will take years before the Iraqi police service is on par with a service like Ottawa's, suggests Sgt. Sadaka. "There is still a great deal of instability in the country, and policing is not the sole dependency to building a country around you. There is a whole gamut of other issues. It may rely on government, it may rely on border policing, and an army, but certainly the police have a strong role in there, but they're not the only role to get the country up and running into a democratic state," he says.

[LiberalFighter]

19. Schools

Iraq’s Schools Suffering From Neglect and War

“Iraq used to have one of the finest school systems in the Middle East,” said UNICEF Iraq Representative Roger Wright. “Now we have clear evidence of how far the system has deteriorated. Today millions of children in Iraq are attending schools that lack even basic water or sanitation facilities, have crumbling walls, broken windows and leaking roofs. The system is overwhelmed.”

[LiberalFighter]

21. Polio Vaccinations

The U.N. Children's Fund and Iraqi health teams began a five-day campaign Sunday to vaccinate 4 million Iraqi children against polio. 24 Feb 2003

Date of Invasion: 19 Mar 2003


UNICEF reports 4 million children vaccinated against polio in Iraq 4 Mar 2003

Preliminary results from UNICEF and the Iraqi Ministry of Health revealed today that 98 per cent of 4.2 million children under five were successfully reached in a nationwide polio immunization campaign last week. This result was achieved through the dedication of 14,000 volunteer Iraqi health workers from over 880 health clinics in the country.

Again!! Date of Invasion: 19 Mar 2003

[splat@14]

15. I think the point is missed. I wouldn't argue that

things will probably be better for Iraq in the long run although it may take generations. The point is that we lied to in order to start a war against a nation that was no threat to us other than it had a lunatic in charge (I'll skip the obvious mental comparison with "*" here for the sake of brevity). There are many other nations out there that fit that description and we aren't after them (yet). Further, Saddam didn't just become a bad guy overnight, he was bad back when George senior was handing him money and weapons and Rumsfeld was shaking his hand back in 1990.

Saying things are getting better now or even that things are going to get better is largely an effort to salvage some positives out of a huge mistake. Kinda like being in a bad car accident and taking solace in the fact that you weren't injured.

I liked the snopes link reply above, the guy has 1st hand knowledge. This is just my opinion....

[benddem]

16. You should point out

that via http://www.snopes.com this email has been circulating since 2003. It would have been entirely impossible for the US to have done this in this time. If these numbers are correct it is probably cause we didn't damage the stuff in the first place.
I get so sick of this stuff, but instead of deleting I know answer with facts....and also email the response to everyone that they sent it too, since most of these emailers don't know how to email blind.

[chat_noir]

18. "Reporters don't report buildings that don't burn."

Great quote from (of all people!) Gerald Rivera.

[chitty]

23. WOW! Thanks for all

the great research and responses.

[wryter2000]

33. Welcome to DU, btw

:hi:

[Mikimouse]

24. You might point out that prior to the US invasion...

Iraq was probably the most progressive of all of the nations in the middle east, and those universities were there and fully operational long before the US invaded.

[sinkingfeeling]

26. Here you go....

Here is a better Did You Know

Did you know that there are five police academies in Iraq that produce over 3,500 new officers every eight weeks? Well, if you're among the millions of recipients of that "Did You Know?" e-mail proliferating on the Internet, you "know" that "fact" along with a whole lot of other good-news items about Iraq – astonishing nuggets of information like "Did you know that there are 1,192,000 cell phone subscribers in Iraq?"

I'll refrain from making Antiwar.com yet another place on the Web where the entire list is reproduced. There are plenty of those already. But you may wonder where the list is coming from.

The urban-legend trackers at Snopes.com have followed e-mails of this type back to mid-2003, not long after President Bush declared "major combat operations" in Iraq completed. They write, "The earliest known antecedent appears to be a Coalition Provisional Authority briefing given by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. presidential envoy to Iraq, on 9 October 2003."

But the "Did You Know" e-mail itself provides no links or sources to support any of its assertions. As Snopes.com notes, it's impossible to attach a "truth value" to such lists, "because they typically contain a mixture of fact, opinion, subjective statements, inaccuracies, and literally true but often misleading claims."

As you already know – because you're reading Antiwar.com – one look beyond your inbox shows that there's no shortage of documented facts about conditions in Iraq. Most of them, unfortunately, are pretty grim.

To cover one's eyes and pluck one example: The Oct. 9 edition of USA Today carried a story by Rick Jervis headlined "Iraq Rebuilding Slows as U.S. Money for Projects Dries Up." From the information in that single article (which ran in a publication not known for publishing radical peacenik propaganda), you can assemble your own "Did You Know" e-mail and forward it to all your friends and foes:

Did you know that half of all Iraqi households still don't have access to clean water?

Did you know that only 8 percent of Iraqi households outside Baghdad are connected to sewage networks?

Did you know that out of 81 water and sewage treatment projects planned as part of the reconstruction effort, 68 have been abandoned?

Did you know that the power in Baghdad is out for 14 hours a day?

Did you know that 330 reconstruction contractors, mostly Iraqis, have been killed?

Did you know that a quarter out of every dollar allocated for reconstruction is being spent on security instead?

Did you know that Iraq's oil production is lower than before the 2003 war, and 46 percent lower than before the 1991 Gulf War?

Did you know that nearly $100 million in U.S. taxpayer-funded reconstruction money for Iraq is unaccounted for?

Did you know that the unemployment/underemployment rate in Iraq stands at 50 percent?

Did you know that all 11 multinational firms working through the Iraqi Project and Contracting Office have "cost-plus" contracts, which guarantee that they will be paid all of their costs, no matter how high they go, plus a profit?

Did you know that expenses for construction of one water treatment plant under a "cost plus" contract have grown from $80 million to $200 million, with taxpayers, not the contractor, making up the difference?

Many Americans, understandably, don't want to believe that there's a situation that Americans can't resolve, if we just try hard enough. But in Iraq, we've created exactly that sort of dead-end predicament. Those of us who are paying for the occupation have to be confronted with the degeneration of Iraq – a process that will continue, whether our intentions are good or bad, as long as there's even one U.S. military unit patrolling the country or one U.S. corporation profiteering from the occupation.

So find some hard facts, identify the sources, put them in a message, and start hitting your "Send" button.


Try here for more: http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/combatend.asp

[chalky]

27. Bookmarking this thread because I'm sure I'll be receiving this piece of

garbage in the near future.

[proud2BlibKansan]

28. Lots of good info here

Voices from Iraq

http://vitw.org/archives/174

[CatBoreal]

30. Have him read this...

Things are not that great in Iraq, especially if you're female.

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/world/article.jsp?content=20051128_116601_116601

[abluelady]

36. I Can't Find the Link

But even though 3100 schools have been renovated, 364 schools are under rehabilitation, 263 schools are now under construction and 38 new schools have been built in Iraq most children are not in school.

It is hard to go to school when there is no water and no electricity in a home and bombs going off wherever.