The French

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DrCruel Arrogance 4/21/2004 5:40:24 PM

(and tht wwi started in 1917 and wwii started in 1942! hahaha, wot a joke!) US entry into WW II was in fact on December 7th, 1941 - after a formal declaration of war on the US by Japan. Our school system here is indeed in a mess. It was not always so. The Left has made considerable inroads into our educational system, replacing basic subject matter with environmental theories and crackpot sociology. They have also taken pains to surpress any negative information regarding the Left - as an example, in high school history books involving WW II, I found a complete absence of info regarding the Russo-German Anti-Aggression Pact, and a map of the holdings of the Nazis and Soviets in 1941 leaves the territories seized by the Soviets as part of that Pact entirely out. It is as if the event never occurred. It's my feeling that political factions, and not nationalities, are better barometers for arrogance and whatnot. Leftists are, save for perhaps Islamic fundamentalists (who they may very well be allied with), in my opinion demonstrably the most arrogant and pig-headed of all people.

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Warhammer RE:Arrogance 6/3/2004 10:48:01 PM

I really wish I could be there to see all the Americans discrediting our good name. Though really, I think 90% of what foreigners see of americans are in fact american military members. In fact, probably quite drunk Americans military members. I would even go so far as to say that most of the complaining about Americans comes from the French. Americans that are not only drunk, but are getting all the slutty French women, hence all the bitching and complaining about us. All the women in France, so used to their cowardly men. An American comes over and they can't help but give themselves up. Guess it must suck to be French on the weekend, when all the American servicemen in England are floating over for a good time. How is that for arrogance? Hah!

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tank RE thats true 6/4/2004 12:08:35 PM

French women drop um on site of a american.WHAT else would you expect though the sight of real man and he is not waving white flag.

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hello RE: fall out 6/16/2004 5:17:44 PM

fallout, I learned History in American High School and I learned that WWI started in 1914 with the incident of the murder of Arch Duke Francis Ferdinand. Also, I learned in the same American History class that WWII started in 1939 with German blitzkreig into Poland. I learned the same thing in a history class in India. Thus if you are trying to say that History classes in the US are designed just to glorify the US, than you are wrong. But I would agree with you in that the math and science teaching in the US schools (not colleges, just schools) is lagging. Also, the creation of Honors level and regular level for each subject does not help the cause of better education in math and science. This is because only 10 to 20% of the kids are in the honors level courses. The rest of the students are in regular courses and therefore do not learn advanced mathematical and scientific skills. I once read an article which mentioned a study conducted on Japanese and American High School senior students. Both were given a Calculus integration problem to solve. 82% of the Japanese students were successful at solving the problem while only about 30% of the American students did it. This has also created a problem for Colleges and Universities in the US because they have to offer Algebra and Trigonometry courses for these freshmen who did not receive adequate mathematical instruction when they were in high schools. And believe me, I know that a lot of students have to enroll for these classes rather than Calculus I in their first semester of college, I have observed this first hand.

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Warhammer RE: fall out 6/18/2004 11:37:24 AM

Yeah, my area didn't have any problem teaching good history, I am not sure where all these incidents of dumb Americans meeting foregners are taking place, but it needs to stop. If you are looking at national testing results... well I know very few people in school who actually took any of those tests seriously, so any results given by that are flawed. As far as math and science, I think the problem in our schools is the fact that you get to choose to take math and science after the first 2 years. All you need is 2 math credits, and 2 science credits to graduate in most of the schools in my area. Most Americans never take Trig and Calc because they take Algebra 1&2, and stop there. And then they manage to take earth science 1, and maybe bio 1 or chem 1, and they are done. These punk kids get too many choices. MAKE them take math and science all 4 years, and that will solve butloads of problems.

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appleciderus Food for Oil 7/5/2004 11:44:32 PM

A bit lengthy, but should be required reading. *** - "As a rule, Saddam's partners-in-corruption were not eager to file official complaints, having nothing to gain from informing on themselves. Nor was the United Nations very inquisitive, despite rumors about corruption from the program's early days. When several oil-for-food contractors brought Iraqi kickback demands to the attention of the program's executive director, Benon V. Sevan, in 2000 ? as the Secretariat finally disclosed to the Financial Times in 2004 ? he effectively buried the issue at that time by telling informants to leave him alone and go file official complaints with their country missions. But in the case of this particular bribe, matters had already gone too far for a brush-off. The informant was a Russian businessman named Gazi Luguev, president of a Swiss-based trading company, Lakia S.A.R.L, which was authorized to buy Iraqi oil from Saddam under the program. Luguev was upset ? not because Saddam's regime had asked him for a bribe ? but because, by his own account, he had paid the bribe to no avail. He wanted his company's money back. As detailed in a fax dated Oct. 2, 2002, which Luguev sent to Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO) and copied to the U.N. oil overseers in Sevan's New York office, Luguev had been asked by the Iraqi regime to pay a "deposit" of $60,000 into a secret bank account in the Jordan National Bank in order to procure an oil-for-food shipment of underpriced Iraqi oil. Any such payment was in gross violation of both U.N. sanctions against Iraq and oil-for-food rules, which spelled out that all Iraq's oil-related revenues would flow strictly into a U.N.-held escrow account. To read the Lakia fax, click here ? Adobe Acrobat required to view pdf. According to Luguev's fax, Lakia had paid the $60,000 to Baghdad in advance (which was by several accounts standard practice for such kickbacks on oil shipments, which were widely rumored to be commonplace). But this time, Iraq did not deliver any oil. So Luguev, in his fax to the Iraqi authorities and to Sevan's office, demanded Iraq refund to Lakia its deposit "or we will be obliged to take all necessary legal steps and apply to all concerned organizations to get our money back." A copy of this fax, and the ensuing correspondence, was obtained by private investigators John Fawcett and Christine Negroni, at the New York law firm of Kreindler & Kreindler. In reviewing these papers recently, they took a closer look at Sevan's response to Luguev's fax. What jumped out was that Sevan had fired off a letter that same day, Oct. 2 (as well he should have, this being formal documentary evidence of a kickback to Saddam's regime.) To read the Sevan letter, click here -- Adobe Acrobat required to view pdf. But did he write immediately to inform the Security Council, which oversaw the program? Did he alert any independent auditing or investigative authority? Evidently not. First, and foremost, Sevan wrote to Saddam's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Aldouri, attaching Luguev's complaint. Sevan warned Aldouri: "I am duty bound to bring the matter to the attention of the Security Council Committee." Sevan then added a crucial sentence: "Prior to doing so, however, I should like to receive most urgently the views and comments of the Government of Iraq on the information provided by Lakia SARL." He asked for a response within one week. In other words, in the interest of what one can only suppose was routine information-gathering at the United Nations, Sevan's first move was, in effect, to give Baghdad a week's notice to bury the evidence and prepare a reply. In a purely private business setting, this might be excused as nothing worse than an attempt to gather all the facts before taking the case to the boss (though in some quarters, one might hope that documented allegations of a $60,000 payoff would warrant the immediate attention of the top brass). But oil-for-food was not a private business. It was an international program that existed ? and was funded handsomely with 2.2 percent of Saddam's oil revenues ? solely to supervise the commerce of a predatory totalitarian regime under strict U.N. sanctions. One would have thought that a fax detailing the illicit flow of money to Saddam's regime via a Jordanian bank account should have inspired loud and immediate alarms on all fronts, and an immediate heads-up to the Security Council ? not just an exclusive letter to the Iraqi mission that begins with the salutation, "Excellencies," and requests "views and comments" about the Lakia charges. Any official oil-for-food document with Sevan's signature gets extra scrutiny these days for two reasons. First, the United Nations has persistently kept most of the vital paperwork concerning the program secret. Second, because there have been allegations, now under investigation, that in 1998 Sevan himself received oil allocations from Saddam. Sevan has denie

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appleciderus RE:The French 7/6/2004 2:23:41 PM

?WASHINGTON ? Transcripts of secret U.N. Security Council sessions show that U.S. and British diplomats were constantly thwarted by their French, Russian and Chinese counterparts while investigating Saddam Hussein's dirty deals under the oil-for-food program. Minutes of meetings of the so-called 661 Committee ? the U.N. Security Council panel that oversaw Iraq sanctions and the oil-for-food program ? have been recently turned over to U.S. congressional committees investigating the $10 billion bribery kickback scandal, officials said. According to a top congressional investigator who has read the highly sensitive documents, the minutes confirm that there was widespread knowledge inside the United Nations years before the war that Saddam's regime was ripping off the $100 billion program by demanding kickbacks from oil traders and suppliers of humanitarian aid to Iraq. The investigator said the transcripts reveal that U.S. and British diplomats repeatedly raised questions about suspicious contracts, but efforts to investigate corruption were blocked by Russia, France, China and, at times, Syria. "The Russians and Chinese made clear their position was that they were against sanctions on Iraq and didn't like this program, so they were not going to help in any way," the investigator said. "The French were two-faced about it. They would respond to American and British requests to halt contracts by saying there was not enough evidence, or more information was needed. In the end, the Americans and British were often forced to back down on these inquiries." France and Russia were two of the biggest opponents of the U.S. war effort to oust Saddam, and Russian and French politicians and businessmen were the most numerous names published in the Baghdad newspaper al-Mada earlier this year of recipients of sweetheart oil deals from Saddam's regime. Ihsan Karim, the Iraqi official heading the probe into alleged corruption, was killed last Thursday. New documents have also surfaced indicating that even when top U.N. officials complained about corruption, little was done. In October 2002, the Russian oil company Lakia Import Export complained in letters to the Iraqi Oil Ministry and to Benon Sevan, the U.N administrator of the program, that Iraq did not honor its agreement to deliver an oil deal, despite the fact that it had already sent a "necessary advanced payment," of $60,000 to Baghdad. Sevan responded with a letter to Mohammed Al-Douri, then Iraq's ambassador to the U.N., asking for an explanation and saying, "I am duty-bound to bring the matter to the U.N. Security Council." Al-Douri replied to Sevan that the information contained in Lakia's letter was "incorrect." Sevan later reported the issue to the 661 Committee. No action appears to have been taken, investigators said. ? Niles Latham ? NY Post ? July 6, 2004

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Trystan RE:The French 11/23/2004 11:23:31 PM

And people wonder why there's so much anti-American sentiment in the world. Looking that the countries that got caught with their hand in the Iraqi oil barrel are the ones voicing their displeasure at America. Most people get mad at the ones that catch them doing shady things.

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appleciderus Chirac can only... 11/26/2004 11:56:40 PM

...avoid prosecution by remaining in power another 13 years! But then again...Arafat may have told him where the secrets are hidden.

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