Correction time, it’d be “the belief line”. Got switched around.

The reasoning is thus. While there are 3 different paths to disbelief, belief, and refusal to believe until more information is forthcoming, you don’t subscribe to any one of them concerning what you said about Iraq the Model.

You obviously don’t believe it, and you use the propaganda line as a reason to disbelieve it. Yet your further comments show that you also believe that you can’t determine whether it is propaganda or not, because it is ‘unverifiable’. You might have used a different wording however, but the meaning would be the same.

So, if you don’t believe it, and you don’t disbelieve it, and you aren’t waiting for more information since you admit you expect no more information, then the only reason why you would bring up the propaganda point is to discount the credibility of Iraq the Model as a justification for why I’m right, and you’re wrong.

Thus, while you don’t obviously subscribe to the belief, disbelief, or witholding of belief concerning whether Iraq the Model is a propaganda project, your actions lean heavily towards the disbelief line.

So when I say that you said Iraq the Model is a propaganda project, I didn’t mean it in the literal sense.

I specifically said that one has no way of knowing if Iraqi blogs critical of the occupation, purported to be written by ordinary Iraqis, are being put up by the insurgents.

That was one of the reasons why I said you disbelieved it, because you said there is no way to know. If there is no way to know, then obviously you don’t subscribe to the trilinear options of intellectual honesty. So I choose the most likely and consistent course of behavior and belief.

I believe Iraq the Model is the real deal and I’ve already considered that it is a CIA/Bush propaganda project. As I’ve said, the justifications were lacking in quantity as well as quality for this line of argument.

In the end, saying it is “possible” that Iraq the Model is a propaganda project without being able to prove it or even believe that it is provable, is a useless justification for why you were right about Iraqi opinions and why I was wrong to quote an Iraqi opinion.

As for the Hamas propaganda, I’ve already detailed the reasons and justifications for why Hamas is conducting a propaganda project with the beach incident. If you don’t have any way to know one way or the other, that doesn’t mean I’m stuck in the same rut.

If you want to straddle the fence, Charles, go ahead. But you might as well call for Hamas legitimizing their own investigations as calling for Israel to conduct a “more legitimate” trial ny judge.

For someone that says Iraq the Model is a CIA propaganda project and therefore he does not believe it, you don’t seem to recognize the actual potentials and capabilities of Palestinian propaganda, Charles.

You’re setting up a strawman here, Ymarsakar. Can you show me where I said that “Iraq the Model” was a propaganda project? I never said so. What I said was that, since it has been reported and acknowledged by the US military itself that the US pays Iraqi media to write and place positive-sounding stories, it cannot be ruled out that the blog in question is one such piece of work, and that this fact should be kept in mind. In other words, I made sufficiently clear that I neither believe nor disbelieve the Iraqi blog you mentioned.

The opposite of “believing” something is not necessarily “disbelieving” it, Ymarsakar. Often, the opposite of either of this two is simply “withholding or reserving judgment”. Only the naive go through the world constantly making such black/white, binary choices, such as “If you don’t believe it, that means you must disbelieve it!” Or, to take another one, “If you aren’t not with me, you must be against me.”

As I said, only the naive go through the world in such a simplistic way.

Incidentally, I also said I look at Iraqi blogs critical of the occupation (such as the one maintained by the Iraqi woman called “Riverbend”) with the exact same degree of “reserving of judgment”. I specifically said that one has no way of knowing if Iraqi blogs critical of the occupation, purported to be written by ordinary Iraqis, are being put up by the insurgents.

In short, I am, and I made it amply clear that I am, what one might call an “equal-opportunity skeptic”.

Furthermore, nowhere did I say that, in this particular incident, I believe the Palestinians’ version of the incident, either. I merely pointed out that the same report in the Jerusalem Post that Sally posted an excerpt from, also states:

“HRW however disputes this claim and basing itself on Palestinian hospital documentation, claims that the explosion actually took place right around the time of the IDF artillery fire.”

It is to be noted that I precisely did not add, in my posting, any editorial comment of my own about belief or disbelief, whether my own or other people’s.

No, I didn’t.

I didn’t quote the entire story, true, since it was easily available from the link. But I did take some pains to note that the IDF and HRW continue to differ over a number of details. One of them concerns the timing of the explosion — but note that even in the part of the article in which these details are brought up, Garlasco, the HRW investigator, is reported as saying ‘Klifi’s team did a “competent job” to rule out the possibility that the blast was caused by artillery fire’.

In contrast to that, do we have any reports of any investigation by any side or any NGO of the death, injury and destruction caused by Hamas’ rockets deliberately fired into Israeli civilian population centers, including schools? No. We don’t. They don’t exist. No NGO is interested.

For someone that says Iraq the Model is a CIA propaganda project and therefore he does not believe it, you don’t seem to recognize the actual potentials and capabilities of Palestinian propaganda, Charles.

It is rather easy, and Hamas has done this before, to bribe doctors and secretaries to forge documentation to corroborate the Story Arc, especially if this is planned ahead of time. And I believe it is.

Hamas knows HRW down to its tail bones, and it also knows the Palestinian doctors, nurses, and whomevers.

While HRW investigates the check and balances of Israel’s investigation, HRW and you are quite obviously ignoring the lack of check and balances in Palestinian hospitals and how prone they are to factual manipulation and mis-data representation.

Iraq saw this in fallujah as well, where hospitals in Fallujah started reporting civilian casualties, which did not exist in reality. Or if it did, the terroists were shooting people and threatening the doctors to say that it was by Americans, or the doctors would disappear.

Palestinian Princess, who lives in Palestine, supports my arguments, specifically about how Hamas are a bunch of goons, mafia types, and we all know the mafia loves threatening people to do what they wantvia extortion.

“While Klifi’s team did a “competent job” to rule out the possibility that the blast was caused by artillery fire, there were still, Garlasco said, a number of pieces of evidence that the IDF commission did not take into consideration.

“The main argument between Klifi and HRW surrounded the timeline of the blast, which the IDF said took between 16:57 and 15:10, at least 10 minutes after artillery fire in the area had stopped. HRW however disputes this claim and basing itself on Palestinian hospital documentation, claims that the explosion actually took place right around the time of the IDF artillery fire.”

Garlasco [Human Rights Watch investigator] told Klifi [head of the IDF inquiry] during the meeting that he was impressed with the IDF’s system of checks and balances concerning its artillery fire in the Gaza Strip and unlike Hamas which specifically targeted civilians in its rocket attacks, the Israelis, he said, invested a great amount of resources and efforts not to harm innocent civilians.

‘We differ when it comes to other pieces of information from other sources that don’t relate to the military strike such as the timing and the type of injuries,” Mair explained. “While they [the IDF] made a very good presentation, we still think there are enough unanswered questions that have not been examined by Klifi’s team…and that is why we believe there should be an independent investigation.”

Link goes direct to comments

So you can use this link to post a comment there.

However I will say that the problems arise because of inconsistency. If Bush stopped using multilateral strategies in NK, then this would solve the problem of NK, perhaps permanently. This would also remove the pretext Iran has for pursuing nuclear weapons, because NK would have been the example that having nukes don’t mean you are protected from the US.

The mixture of unilateral and multilateral actions, best depicted by Iraq, is a harmful hybrid titration that is not a good idea to pursue.

The detriments of the multilateral strategy with NK producing an arms race in Iran, is not I say again it is not an indication that the unilateral or enforcement policies of the USA is in itself flawed.