Found this on another site...
July 4, 2004

NEW YORK — As a young boy, I loved the American flag. I'd lead my younger sisters in patriotic parades up and down the sidewalk, waving the flag, blowing a whistle and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over and over until my sisters begged me to let them go back to their Easy-Bake Oven.

I loved singing the national anthem. I won an essay contest on "What the Flag Means to Me." I decorated my bicycle with little American flags for a Fourth of July parade and won a prize for that too. I became an Eagle Scout and proudly promised to do my duty to God and country. And every year I asked to be the one who planted the flag on the grave of my uncle, a paratrooper who was killed in World War II. I was taught to admire his sacrifice, and I hoped to grow up and do my part, as he had, to keep us free.

But, in high school, things changed. Nine boys from my school came back home from Vietnam in boxes. Draped over each coffin was the American flag. I knew that they also had made a sacrifice. But their sacrifice wasn't for their country: They were sent to die by men who lied to them. Those men — presidents, senators, government officials — wrapped themselves in the flag too, hoping that their lies would never be questioned, never be discovered. They wrapped themselves in the very flag that was placed on the coffins of my friends and neighbors. I stopped singing the national anthem at football games, and I stopped putting out the flag.

I realize now I never should have stopped.

For too long now we have abandoned our flag to those who see it as a symbol of war and dominance, as a way to crush dissent at home. Flags are flying from the back of SUVs, rising high above car dealerships, plastering the windows of businesses and adorning paper bags from fast-food restaurants. But these flags are intended to send a message: "You're either with us or you're against us," "Bring it on!" or "Watch what you say, watch what you do."

Those who absconded with our flag now use it as a weapon against those who question America's course. They remind me of that famous 1976 photo of an anti-busing demonstrator in Boston thrusting a large American flag on a pole into the stomach of the first black man he encountered. These so-called patriots hold the flag tightly in their grip and, in a threatening pose, demand that no one ask questions. Those who speak out find themselves shunned at work, harassed at school, booed off Oscar stages. The flag has become a muzzle, a piece of cloth stuffed into the mouths of those who dare to ask questions.

I think it's time for those of us who love this country — and everything it should stand for — to reclaim our flag from those who would use it to crush rights and freedoms, both here at home and overseas. We need to redefine what it means to be a proud American.

If you are one of those who love what President Bush has done for this country and believe you must blindly follow the president to deserve to fly the flag, you should ask yourself some difficult questions about just how proud you are of the America we now inhabit:

Are you proud that one in six children lives in poverty in America?

Are you proud that 40 million adult Americans are functional illiterates?

Are you proud that the bulk of the jobs being created these days are low- and minimum-wage jobs?

Are you proud of asking your fellow Americans to live on $5.15 an hour?

Are you proud that, according to a National Geographic Society survey, 85% of young adult Americans cannot find Iraq on the map (and 11% cannot find the United States!)?

Are you proud that the rest of the world, which poured out its heart to us after Sept. 11, now looks at us with disdain and disgust?

Are you proud that more than one billion people on this planet do not have access to clean drinking water when we have the resources and technology to remedy this immediately?

Are you proud of the fact that our president sent our soldiers off to a war that had nothing to do with the self-defense of this country?

If these things represent what it means to be an American these days — and I am an American — should I hang my head in shame? No. Instead, I intend to perform what I believe is my patriotic duty. I can't think of a more American thing to do than raise questions — and demand truthful answers — when our leader wants to send our sons and daughters off to die in a war.

If we don't do that — the bare minimum — for those who offer to defend our country, then we have failed them and ourselves. They offer to die for us, if necessary, so that we can be free. All they ask in return is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. And with this war, we have broken faith with our troops by sending them off to be killed and maimed for wrong and immoral reasons.

This is the true state of disgrace we are living in. I hope we can make it up someday to these brave kids (and older men and women in our reserves and National Guard). They deserve an apology, they deserve our thanks — and a raise — and they deserve a big parade with lots of flags.

I would like to lead that parade, carrying the largest flag. And I would like the country to proclaim that never again will a war be fought unless it is our last resort.

Let's create a world in which, when people see the Stars and Stripes, they will think of us as the people who brought peace to the world, who brought good-paying jobs to all citizens and clean water for the world to drink.

In anticipation of that day, I am putting my flag out today, with hope and with pride.























Written by Michael Moore
http://www.michaelmoore.com/

 

I had a sick feeling that it was written by him.

 

i work at a credit union and we use the patriots act..where if you come to open an account and even old members we have to have 2 forms of id, plus we use this system called ofac, to see if their name comes up at all to any matching name for suspecious(sp) terriorists/criminal acts all over the world...i think it's good we do this.

 

This type of **** makes me sick.....this guy is a so called "documentry filmmaker" but yet all he is doing is placing HIS OWN OPNIONS in movies.....which anyone in the USA has the right to...but ppl are eating his OPNIONS up like there're facts written in stone.....what were doing right now is playing the game of who can better pull the blinds over ppls eyes......bush is doing it to get his views through and moore is doing it to get his through.......u are an ignorant stupid sob if u eat anyones views and opinions up without even thinking, researching, or taking into account other resources...which a whole lot of the american public is doing at the moment mind u.........We are at a point now when we need to unite and act as one....as a country united instead of divided like we have been.......its FUKING PATHETIC it took 9/11 to bring the country together and its PATHETIC how fast everyone forgot about it and became divided and involved in only what is best for them.......and its really sad that its going to take another large scale attack....(which i believe will happen since every inch of the US cant be patrolled at the same time....and since security is still so lax) to bring us together again....but i think this next time its gonna be alot worse than it was before......if u feel ur all safe and everything ur living in an imaginary world......that idea of being "safe" just becasue i live in America was violently raped from me the day the twin towers fell.....and NEVER AGAIN WILL I FEEL THE SAME SECURITY.......AND NEVER AGAIN WILL I BE SO TRUSTING OF OUTSIDERS.......think what u may think we are safe revil in ur invented blanket of security............

and now onto the ?s


ANSWERS

1. NO......but a better figure compared to the rest of countries in the world.

2. see answer to ? 1

3. at least there is jobs to be offered.....also see answer to ? 1

4. see answer to ? 1

5. and our children need to know the location of iraq why?...so they can travel there...LMFAO ......hmmm that 11% that doesnt know where the US is probably consists of kids who dont attend school and who dont care about school.

6. NO why should we?.... 1. as far as im concerned those ****** still owe us for WWII and all the other wars we helped them win..........2. does it matter..what can they possibly do to us.....or should i say have the ***** to do?

7. again we come back to the fact that we should be the keepers of the world yet everyone hates us.....god these ppl really fukin amaze me...

8. nothing to do..hmmm thats intresting....well if we had not gone back now we probably would have been involved in a much larger scale war in the near future......also the fact the we went to help the iraqi ppl...see now this is where it gets intresting...cause u have the ppl that say we just went to war to take iraqs oil......ummm what about Bosnia?......Kuwait?......Isreal?.......all i see there is us helping ppl......but since theres oil in iraq thats why we went there...RIIIIIIIIIIGHT...........prob not the only reason but theres one for all the ppl that dont think there was any reason for us to go.......



first off.....it war ppl die its a fact......stomach it....secondly before i get attacked like a rabbit by a bunch of hungry wolves for that comment......ive spoke with ppl in the armed forces who were over in iraq and afganistan fighting, who had friends die next to them....who were surrounded by death and destruction.....and u know what????.... mr moore needs to interview these ppl cause they told me that they beleived in what they were fighting for and who they were fighting for....and that they would go back if need be.............that should say it all........

 

[QUOTE]8. nothing to do..hmmm thats intresting....well if we had not gone back now we probably would have been involved in a much larger scale war in the near future..

i'm gonna have to disagree on this one, i think the US is more of a threat to world peace than any other country is right now. Any large scale war that would have happened would probably be our fault.

 

[QUOTE=smoothkustard]
yah u know what ur prob right.....i mean saddam gassing a few thousand kurds doesnt make hime dangerous....i mean if thats what he can do to his own ppl hed prob be great to other countries.....plus the fact that the #1 superpower in the world has so much to gain by going to war with third world countries


think before u open ur mouth.........

 

Come on guys!

Everyone has an opinion on how the world should work, theres no need to bash each other for what you may think is an uneducated opinion. I"m not siding, just saying lets keep it civil!

The Mod's

 

woah i didn't think they were bashing each other....chill
oh and all those facts that Mr Moore stated are not the result of just Bush's presidency it took a while to get like that and let's see who was in office for 8 years before him. and no matter what there will be people living in poverty and others who can't read...you can't teach a person who doesn't want to learn how to read. and you can't make a lazy person work. The world isn't perfect but i would rather live here then in some other country.

 

exactly!!!!......everyone who crys and complains about our government.....thats all theyll do....no ones gonna move just cause they dont agree..it just gives them something to cry about and make them happy

 

I don't understand why people wine and cry cuz that we shouldn't be at war cuz it killing our loved ones blah blah blah......why do you think these people joined the armed forces. They new what they were getting into when they signed up. There is a chance you may have to go to war everyone knows that. Stop your crying....

 

yes that is true, we all know that when we sign up there will be that chance we will be deployed. But as a country we needed to take action instead of just sit over here waiting for the next inevitable attack (because these guys are not going to just give up) and let more people die. And while some people will say that Iraq and Saddam were not a threat to us, there is lots going on that you don't know and there is tons of info that you are not privy to.

 

She's absolutly right, you have no idea how much classified material you'll never see affects you, me, this war, this country, everything in the global scope. There is A LOT going on behind closed doors, stuff you'll all never see. Don't make any assumptions about this war, don't make any solid decisions because you only know what the money hungry biased media wants you to know.

And God forbid you take Micheal Moore's word as gospel! Don't fall into that trap, he's just displying his personal opinion and his half of the story, and too many people are jumping on his bandwagon because his manipulation of the truth is easier to undertand than the actual truth.

 

Oh I totally understand that there are things we haven't a clue about. But I know if someone attacked my country as the pres. I wouldn't sit back and wait for them to do it again.

Oh and the things we are left in the dark about are "who really killed Nick Berg"

 

I think with Nick Berg, we'll just never know. Its that simple

On a brighter note, the Lebanese born US Marine captured last week was returned to the US Enbassy in Lebanon just hours ago. He'll be on his way to a US Military Instalation in Germany for a medical examination later today.

 

i think micheal moore is a moron and real close to a communist. i hate how everyone blames bush, he had nothing to do with 9/11. terrorists were in our country training for this when clinton was in office. i would like to ask a couple questions too.

how is saddam not hitler?

wwII was justified so why not iraq?

what kind of leader kills his own people?

How do muslims(NOT ALL just radicals) think that killing jews & any one who isnt muslim something god wants? its not in the quran like many say and if it is it is taken out of context.

these people deserve to die. thats what they live for, they live to bring death into the world, even if it means killing themselves.

america is the best country to live in, maybe holland and canada are close.

if people dont like america so much then get out and move to iraq and support them. then you wont have to complain about a new job that only pays 5.15/hr.

i could go on forever but i should stop now before this turns into a 20 page post

 

Damn I like this guy. Michael more is a f*ckin tool, check out www.mooreexposed.com, see how much of a great guy he is. Someone should kick his fat McDonald eatin *** in the nuts, do the world a favor....

 

I don't know about you... but I don't liked being lied too... esp when we have to go a shitty country and fight a war for no fu*kin reason...it was a waste of 8 months of my life...with a few friends lost.. and the other 1000s dead you have to ask "WAS IT WORTH IT????" I don't think so...
Sure Saddam was a bad guy.. but there was no threat to the U.S. The country of Iraq had never killed a American (other then the two wars.) So how can it be Justified???????? maybe because Bush and his Cabinet of Oil executives had other plans...

And for the people who comment on F 9/11.. did you see the movie...????
if you haven't I'd ask you to see it (download it, if you have too) and then comment on it...you keep on saying it's full of lies.. maybe some of his views and Opinions (which he says that is what the movie is HIS OPINIONS) are twisted... but how do you explain the mother grieving over the lost of her son killed in Iraq??? is that fake????


Report slams CIA for Iraq intelligence failures
Analysts' 'group think' blamed for false assumptions on weapons
Friday, July 9, 2004 Posted: 3:31 PM EDT (1931 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In a highly critical report issued Friday, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee found that the CIA's prewar estimates of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were overstated and unsupported by intelligence.

Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, told reporters that intelligence used to support the invasion of Iraq was based on assessments that were "unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence."

The committee's conclusions are contained in a 511-page report released Friday.

"Before the war, the U.S. intelligence community told the president as well as the Congress and the public that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and if left unchecked would probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade," Roberts said.

"Today we know these assessments were wrong."

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the leading Democrat on the 18-member panel, said that "bad information" was used to bolster the case for war.

"We in Congress would not have authorized that war with 75 votes if we knew what we know now," the West Virginia Democrat said.

"Leading up to September 11, our government didn't connect the dots. In Iraq, we are even more culpable because the dots themselves never existed."

Roberts listed several points emphasized in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that were "overstated or "not supported by the raw intelligence reporting."

Among these were that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, had chemical and biological weapons, and was developing an unmanned aerial vehicle, probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents.

He also said the intelligence community failed to "accurately or adequately explain the uncertainties behind the judgments in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to policymakers."

Rockefeller said that the "intelligence failures" will haunt America's national security "for generations to come."

"Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower," he said. "We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before."

The top-ranking members of the Senate committee offered different interpretations on political pressures on the intelligence community.

"The committee found no evidence that the intelligence community's mischaracterization or exaggeration of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the[SIZE=5]result of politics or pressure[/SIZE] ," Roberts said.

But although he approved the report, Rockefeller said it fails to explain fully the pressures on the intelligence community "when the most senior officials in the Bush administration had already forcefully and repeatedly stated their conclusions publicly."

"It was clear to all of us in this room who were watching that -- and to many others -- that they had made up their mind that they were going to go to war," he said.

House investigation
Critics of the war had expressed concerned about visits to the CIA by Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials, but the report said it found no evidence that policymakers asked inappropriate questions of analysts or tried to pressure them into changing their views.

Some GOP lawmakers on the panel successfully blocked Democratic efforts to finish the second part of the report -- how the Bush administration used the information from the intelligence community -- until after the November elections.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, said she hoped a similar investigation from the House of Representatives would address some of those issues, adding she was frustrated in her attempts to get the investigation off the ground.

"There has not been the cooperation that there apparently has been on the Senate side," said Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

She said she had written to committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Florida, four times. "And just today we were able to sit down together," Harman said.

Goss, a former CIA agent, has been mentioned as a possible replacement for outgoing CIA Director George Tenet, who was blasted in the Senate report. Tenet has resigned and leaves office Sunday.

"I would hope we could address [the issues] factually and on a bipartisan basis, but at the moment I don't have a lot of confidence in it," Harman said.

Rockefeller said the administration's position was that Iraq stockpiled weapons and actively pursued a nuclear weapons program and that it "might use its alliances with terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda, to use these weapons to strike at the United States."

Rockefeller said that "no evidence existed of Iraq's complicity or assistance in al Qaeda's terrorist attacks, including 9/11."

The report said that intelligence analysts were "accurate and not affected by a lack of relevant source or operational detail" in making a connection between Iraq and terrorism -- although it did say that contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq in the 1990s "did not add up to an established formal relationship."

Roberts: Case for war based on 'flawed' information
Roberts said President Bush and Congress sent the country to war based on "flawed" information provided by the intelligence community.

He said the panel concluded that the intelligence community suffered "from what we call a collective group think, which led analysts and collectors and managers to presume that Iraq had active and growing WMD programs."

Roberts said this "group think caused the community to interpret ambiguous evidence, such as the procurement of dual-use technology, as conclusive evidence of the existence of WMD programs."

The report criticized the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense Human Intelligence Service for their handling of an informer code-named "Curveball," noting that the latter "demonstrated serious lapses in handling such an important source."

Over and over, the report noted, analysts had exaggerated what they knew and left out, glossed over or simply dismissed dissenting views.

The report said that the intelligence community eliminated caveats about assessments when it compiled a document hurriedly released to the public in October 2002, thus misrepresenting "their judgments to the public which did not have access to the classified National Intelligence Estimate containing the more carefully worded assessments."

The National Intelligence Estimate was used to persuade Congress to authorize war, but administration officials for weeks already had been putting out the kind of information found in it.

Regarding Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the United Nations -- in which he presented the U.S. case for war -- the report said that much of the information from the CIA "was overstated, misleading or incorrect."

Roberts said the most troubling finding was the lack of human intelligence in Iraq.

"Most alarmingly, after 1998 and the exit of the U.N. inspectors, the CIA had no human intelligence sources inside Iraq who were collecting against the WMD target," Roberts said.

He said most of the problems come from a "broken corporate culture and poor management and cannot be solved by simply adding funding and also personnel."

Roberts also called intelligence failures before the war "global" and not confined to the United States.

CNN's David Ensor contributed to this report.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/...nce/index.html