[Peace] NY times piece on Halabja

[Margaret E. Kosal]

At 14:53 2/1/2003 -0600, pfmueth at mail1-0.chcgil.ameritech.net wrote:


>>My final conclusion is that this reinforces the absolute necessity of
>>- rigorously speaking within one's knowledge base ... there will almost 
>>always be someone out there who knows more.
>
>I disagree with this,  one doesn't need scientific certainty to call in to 
>question commonplaces in the current discourse about the Iran-Iraq war.

Paul -

i think we actually do agree ... speculation, strong suggest and the 
questioning or what i prefer - *challenging* the data, the assumptions 
behind the analysis of the data and how it was presented can absolutely be 
valuable & should be done!

There's a critical difference between challenging from secondary or 
tertiary sources and having in hand hemoglobin tests results.

>If you notice Peletiere doesn't assert that Iraq  wasn't the source of the 
>gas, just that chemicals were used on both sides and there is ambiguity
>which should be acknowledged.
>
>>- rigorously differentiating between verifiable/verified data and 
>>hypothesis.  Proof by assertion only gets one so far.

Exactly - acknowledging the ambiguity.

As i wrote before - one cannot look at a body (or picture of a body) and 
say absolutely - "This person died from hydrogen cyanide, rather than 
sarin."  It sends up a red flag.  But again, i acknowledge that NY Times is 
not a journal of experimental results.

Namaste,
Margaret

p.s Excellent shows on DU on Democracy Now!  i cheered when Durakovic cited 
bringing in geologists w/r/t confirming that before Operation Enduring 
Freedom levels of natural uranium in bombed areas of Afghanistan were very low.