bunch of hypocrites these amreekans, they r following saddam’s path of brutal torture {abu ghraib prison} & killings @ wedding party and they opposed saddam when he did the same 
] shame on bush and the ppl who voted for him to be elected as president of amreeka excluding state of florida + shame on bush snr for having such a evil and criminal minded son.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by underthedome: *
You're absolutely correct Fraudz, this further demonstrates the need for UN intervention.
[/QUOTE]
UTD, but we can not just go to UN.. and if its just has UN's rubber stamp but we are still running the show, the people will never buy it. The only way to convince UN is to let UN take control, and have soldiers from many countries, including ours be there. Could our current political leaders agree to thatthough, or will they force the whole "My way or teh highway" approach which got us in this mess to start with.
My goodness 40+ wedding guests wiped out by gung ho GI Joes in helicopters yet again.
Have`nt we heard this story in numerous places such as afghanistan, iraq and elsewhere.
I swear the right wing brigade would defend even if Amerikkka dropped a nuclear bomb on bagdad city itself, their excuses are becoming worse by the day!
How convenient a stash of weapons, passports, and communication radios, just happen to be in same place as a wedding which has just witnessed a masscre by Globocops this smacks of a lame attempt at a damage limitation exercise by the amerikkkans!
Smart weapons, latest technology really hmmm who ever associated smart with the amerikkkans because they are far from that at the moment!
Inna lillahee wa inna illahee rajioon.
Families wiped out just like that.
Disgusted :(
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by underthedome: *
wedding at 2:45am, ehh?
[/QUOTE]
People don't party that late in the USA?
No wonder you guys have been defeated in Iraq, if you don't even have a clue about the local traditions and customs of the country. The same ignorance of local customs and history was of course at display during the Vietnam war as well.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by myvoice: *
OK. I can buy into the cultural differences about little kids participating in a wedding party celebration at 3 AM.
I have a harder time accepting that the numerous weapons recovered on the ground, 2 million Iraqi and Syrian dinar, foreign passports and a satcom radio were merely wedding presents. Sounds an awful lot like a "foreign fighter's safehouse" as alleged by the military. Of course, both stories could be true. Maybe it was a wedding involving foreign fighters and the reception was in their safehouse.
[/QUOTE]
Show me a family in that area without numerous weapons.
2M Iraqi dinar is not even US$2K.. 2M Syrian pounds are just over US$40K, not suspiciously high amounts by any stretch.
Foreign passports? These are crossborder areas! It's like wondering why people in Frankfurt/Oder and Slublice might have foreign passports!
Satcoms? For some odd reason I don't think the Baby Bells are running land lines out there.. how else do you expect folks to conduct business? Or should they use smoke signals?
Now I'm not discounting the possibility that there were some unsavory types out there, but each of these points, alone or as a whole, do not signal anything. It's like saying every terrorist has a spleen so everyone with a spleen is a terrorist. Supposing there were some bad guys out there, this operation was pulled off in a real ***ty manner. If you know where the bad guys are, and they are in an isolated area, as this is, you wait for a moment when they expose themselves as far away from innocents as possible. And if we're now going to fall back on the 'but those innocents are sympathizers' argument, I'm just going to have to give up. Those innocents are also *family.
RAMADI, Iraq (AP) — As survivors tell it, the wedding party was in full swing. The band was playing tribal music and the guests had just finished eating dinner when, at about 9 p.m., they heard the roar of U.S. warplanes. Fearing trouble, the revelers ended the festivities and went to bed.
About six hours later, the first bomb struck the tent.
“Mothers died with their children in their arms,” said Madhi Nawaf, who survived the attack Wednesday in Mogr el-Deeb on the Syrian border. Up to 45 people died — mostly women and children from the Bou Fahad tribe.
“One of them was my daughter,” Nawaf told The Associated Press. “I found her a few steps from the house, her 2-year-old son Raad in her arms.** Her 1-year-old son, Raed, was lying nearby, missing his head.”**
The survivors insist the Americans were wrong to target them.
“They’re lying,” Nawaf said. “They have to show us evidence that we fired a shot or were hiding foreign fighters. Where are the foreign fighters then? Why kill and dismember innocent children?”
“We began to expect some kind of catastrophe,” Nawaf said.
They decided to end the celebration, and the bride and groom, Azhar Rikad and Rutba Sabah, went into their tent.
The first bomb struck the main tent at about 2:45 a.m., the survivors said. Among those who died was Hussein al-Ali, a prominent wedding singer from Baghdad. The second bomb struck the stone house, killing everyone inside.
“They didn’t even spare one child, one elderly,” said the 54-year-old Nawaf.
Survivors said shells rained down until nearly sunrise.
Some of the men tried to approach the Americans but were driven back by gunshots, the survivors said. The troops took money and jewelry the dead women had brought for the party, survivors said.
At the cemetery outside Ramadi, Taleb Nawaf pointed to a fresh grave with a headstone marked “Amal Rikab and Kholood.”
“This is my daughter,” he said.
Mourners displayed photographs of six children and their parents, Mohammed and Morifa Rikad, saying all had died in the bombing.
“For each one in those graves, we will get 10 Americans,” Ahmed Saleh warned.
US wedding masscre of iraqis the aftermath!
Honestly i cant belive how dumb these amerikkan forces are. They claim to have technology and smart weapons superior to anyone how about trying to get brains to match.
Yet these amerikkkan forces still denying they commited a masscre, when GI Joes get blown up daily in iraq they have no one to blame except there own government and themselves!
Oh God
May Allah give them sabr.
One incident. Forty dead. Two stories. What really happened?](http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=523356)
**A tiny bundle of blankets is unwrapped; inside is the body of a baby, its limbs smeared with dried blood. Then the mourners peel back the blanket further to reveal a second dead baby.
Another blanket is opened; inside are the bodies of a mother and child. The child, six or seven years old, is lying against his or her mother, as if seeking comfort. But the child has no head.**
These are the images that American forces in Iraq had no answer to yesterday. They come from video footage of the burials of 41 men, women and children. The Iraqis say they died when American planes launched air strikes on a wedding party near the Syrian border on Wednesday.
US forces insist that the attack was on a safe house used by foreign fighters entering Iraq from Syria. They do not dispute that they killed about 40 people, but claim American forces were returning fire and the dead were all foreign fighters. For the video footage that shows dead women and children they have no explanation.
**So potentially damaging is the video to the US occupation that American officials have demanded that the Dubai-based al-Arabiya television news network, which obtained the footage, give them the name of the cameraman who took it. Al-Arabiya has refused.
In the footage men weep and cling to the bodies of their loved ones before they are buried. There are dozens of bundles wrapped in flower-patterned blankets. Some of these images were shown on Western television news yesterday, but not the most disturbing: the bodies themselves.**
“These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let’s not be naive,” Major General James Mattis, commander of the US 1st Marine Division, said. But he had no explanation of where the dead women and children in the video came from. “I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars,” he said cryptically. “I don’t have to apologise for the conduct of my men.”
US forces say they have been watching the border area where the attack took place for some time. They saw a large group of suspicious people moving in the area and sent in ground forces, who came under fire, so the US forces returned fire.
They are sticking doggedly to this version of events despite growing evidence that a wedding party was hit. More and more eyewitnesses are coming forward. Hussein Ali, a well-known wedding singer, was buried in Baghdad yesterday, alongside his brother Mohammed. Their family said they had been performing at the wedding.
The evidence that the US military has put forward to support its version of events has been seriously undermined. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said guns, Syrian passports and a satellite phone had been recovered. But Sheikh Nasrallah Miklif, the head of the Bani Fahd tribe to which most of the dead belonged, said that was to be expected, given that the air strike happened in Makradheeb, a village in the desert, about 10 miles from the Syrian border.
Every household in Iraq has a gun, usually a Kalashnikov assault rifle, to protect itself. In the desert it is even more common for people to keep guns, as protection not only from robbers, but also wild animals. Shepherds need to protect their flocks.
The village is 80 miles from the nearest town, al-Qa’im, and 10 miles from the nearest road. There are no telephone lines and no mobile coverage. Satellite phones are comparatively cheap in Iraq and it would be surprising if the villagers did not have one.
People in the area frequently marry neighbours from across the border. That means there have always been villagers on the Iraqi side with Syrian passports and vice versa. On top of that, many of the villagers on both sides make their living smuggling sheep across the border, and have been routinely crossing it for years - not entirely legal, but that does not make them foreign fighters planning to attack US forces.
General Mattis asked: “How many people go to the middle of the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilisation?” Iraqis replied that the victims of the attack were holding the wedding in the village where they had lived all their lives.
Sheikh Mikfil was not in the village at the time of the attack, but he has spoken at length with the survivors. All of the villagers were members of his tribe; the only dead from outside were the musicians. He put the death toll at 41 - 25 of whom were members of the bridegroom’s family. The wedding was held at the home of the bridegroom’s father, Rikat Obeid Hussein. The newly married couple survived because they were in a specially erected honeymoon tent when the bombing began.
The sheikh said that by 2am, when the attack started, the celebrations were finished and the guests were asleep. There had been US helicopters in the sky earlier, but they had not fired and the wedding guests were not worried.
General Kimmitt said: “We sent a ground force in to the location. They were shot at. We returned fire.”
But Sheikh Mikfil said the attack began with air strikes, without warning. They were followed by helicopters, and after several hours of air strikes, US troops arrived in armoured vehicles to search the devastated village.
Contrary to earlier reports, the sheikh said, there was no celebratory gunfire. Firing guns in the air is traditional at Iraqi weddings, and it was initially suspected that US forces had mistaken such shooting for hostile fire, as they did at a wedding party in Afghanistan when US air strikes killed more than 50 people in 2002. Sheikh Mikfil says he questioned the survivors extensively on this, and they were categorical: there was no shooting in the air.
He said the bride came from the same village, so there was no large-scale movement of people that could have aroused US suspicions. “If they killed foreign fighters, why don’t they show us the bodies?” he asked. “If they suspected foreign fighters were there, why didn’t they come to arrest them, instead of using this huge force?”
Sheikh Mikfil said he suspected the Americans might have been acting on false intelligence information, given by someone who wanted to increase the tension between Iraqis and Americans.
It is impossible to reconcile the American and Iraqi versions of events. But with more and more evidence emerging that casts doubt on the American version, and Iraqi anger rising, US forces need to come up with some answers. If this was one of the “bad things” that “happen in wars” - to use General Mattis’s phrase - more explanation is required.
[QUOTE]
Originally posted by ehsan: *
So potentially damaging is the video to the US occupation that **American officials have demanded ... the name of the cameraman who took it*. Al-Arabiya has refused.
[/QUOTE]
WTF?!?!?
What is the possible purpose of that??
We went into Iraq to overthrow what kind of government?? I keep forgetting.
*“I saw something that nobody ever saw in this world,” said Mr Nawaf. “There were children’s bodies cut into pieces, women cut into pieces, men cut into pieces.” *
*Among the dead was his daughter Fatima Ma’athi, 25, and her two young boys, Raad, four, and Raed, six. “I found Raad dead in her arms. The other boy was lying beside her. I found only his head,” he said. His sister Simoya, the wife of Haji Rakat, was also killed with her two daughters. “The Americans call these people foreign fighters. It is a lie. I just want one piece of evidence of what they are saying.” *
The Wedding Massacre: ‘US soldiers started to shoot us, one by one’ - The Guardian
**Rory McCarthy in Ramadi, 21.05.04 - Survivors describe wedding massacre as generals refuse to apologise **
The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above.
It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.
“The bombing started at 3am,” she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. “We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one,” she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground.
She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. “I left them because they were dead,” she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell.
“I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn’t kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me.”
Mrs Shibab’s description, backed by other witnesses, of an attack on a sleeping village is at odds with the American claim that they came under fire while targeting a suspected foreign fighter safe house.
She described how in the hours before dawn she watched as American troops destroyed the Rakat villa and the house next door, reducing the buildings to rubble.
Another relative carried Mrs Shihab and her surviving child to hospital. There she was told her husband Mohammed, the eldest of the Rakat sons, had also died.
As Mrs Shihab spoke she gestured with hands still daubed red-brown with the henna the women had used to decorate themselves for the wedding. Alongside her in the ward yesterday were three badly injured girls from the Rakat family: Khalood Mohammed, aged just a year and struggling for breath, Moaza Rakat, 12, and Iqbal Rakat, 15, whose right foot doctors had already amputated.
By the time the sun rose on Wednesday over the Rakat family house, the raid had claimed 42 lives, according to Hamdi Noor al-Alusi, manager of the al-Qaim general hospital, the nearest to the village.
Among the dead were 27 members of the extended Rakat family, their wedding guests and even the band of musicians hired to play at the ceremony, among them Hussein al-Ali from Ramadi, one of the most popular singers in western Iraq.
Dr Alusi said 11 of the dead were women and 14 were children. “I want to know why the Americans targeted this small village,” he said by telephone. “These people are my patients. I know each one of them. What has caused this disaster?”
Despite the compelling testimony of Mrs Shihab, Dr Alusi and other wedding guests, the US military, faced with appar ent evidence of yet another scandal in Iraq, offered an inexplicably different account of the operation.
The military admitted there had been a raid on the village at 3am on Wednesday but said it had targeted a “suspected foreign fighter safe house”.
“During the operation, coalition forces came under hostile fire and close air support was provided,” it said in a statement. Soldiers at the scene then recovered weapons, Iraqi dinar and Syrian pounds (worth approximately £800), foreign passports and a “Satcom radio”, presumably a satellite telephone.
“We took ground fire and we returned fire,” said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the US military in Iraq. “We estimate that around 40 were killed. But we operated within our rules of engagement.”
Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was scathing of those who suggested a wedding party had been hit. “How many people go to the middle of the desert … to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilisation? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let’s not be naive.”
**When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child’s body being lowered into a grave, he replied: “I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don’t have to apologise for the conduct of my men.” **
The celebration at Mukaradeeb was to be one of the biggest events of the year for a small village of just 25 houses. Haji Rakat, the father, had finally arranged a long-negotiated tribal union that would bring together two halves of one large extended family, the Rakats and the Sabahs.
Haji Rakat’s second son, Ashad, would marry Rutba, a cousin from the Sabahs. In a second ceremony one of Ashad’s female cousins, Sharifa, would marry a young Sabah boy, Munawar.
A large canvas awning had been set up in the garden of the Rakat villa to host the party. A band of musicians was called in, led by Hamid Abdullah, who runs the Music of Arts recording studio in Ramadi, the nearest major town.
He brought his friend Hussein al-Ali, a popular Iraqi singer who performs on Ramadi’s own television channel. A handful of other musicians including the singer’s brother Mohaned, played the drums and the keyboards.
The ceremonies began on Tuesday morning and stretched through until the late evening. “We were happy because of the wedding. People were dancing and making speeches,” said Ma’athi Nawaf, 55, one of the neighbours.
Late in the evening the guests heard the sound of jets overhead. Then in the distance they saw the headlights of what appeared to be a military convoy heading their way across the desert.
The party ended at around 10.30pm and the neighbours left for their homes. At 3am the bombing began. “The first thing they bombed was the tent for the ceremony,” said Mr Nawaf. “We saw the family running out of the house. The bombs were falling, destroying the whole area.”
Armoured military vehicles then drove into the village, firing machine guns and supported by attack helicopters. “They started to shoot at the house and the people outside the house,” he said.
Before dawn two large Chinook helicopters descended and offloaded dozens of troops. They appeared to set explosives in the Rakat house and the building next door and minutes later, just after the Chinooks left again, they exploded into rubble.
“I saw something that nobody ever saw in this world,” said Mr Nawaf. “There were children’s bodies cut into pieces, women cut into pieces, men cut into pieces.”
Among the dead was his daughter Fatima Ma’athi, 25, and her two young boys, Raad, four, and Raed, six. “I found Raad dead in her arms. The other boy was lying beside her. I found only his head,” he said. His sister Simoya, the wife of Haji Rakat, was also killed with her two daughters. “The Americans call these people foreign fighters. It is a lie. I just want one piece of evidence of what they are saying.”
Remarkably among the survivors were the two married couples, who had been staying in tents away from the main house, and Haji Rakat himself, an elderly man who had gone to bed early in a nearby house.
From the mosques of Ramadi volunteers had been called to dig at the graveyard of the tribe, on the southern outskirts of the city.
There lay 27 graves: mounds of dirt each marked with a single square of crudely cut marble, a name scribbled in black paint. Some gave more than one name, and one, belonging to a woman Hamda Suleman, the briefest of explanations: “The American bombing.”
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
and then they had the gall to categorically state that it wasnt a wedding they had raided a terrorist hideout.
unfrikkin believable.
In order that they can declare the cameramen an AlQaeeda operative and arrest him and send him to Abu Ghuraib prison for some rest and recreation.
^ its because they know they have suckers back home who take thier word as the bible truth. On top of that, the scumbags know they can get away with it.
Or just maybe it was not a wedding:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) – Dozens of people killed in a U.S. attack in the Iraqi desert Wednesday were attending a high-level meeting of foreign fighters, not a wedding, and photos shown to reporters in Baghdad support that belief, according to the senior coalition military spokesman.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said six women were among the dead, but there is no evidence any children died in the raid early Wednesday near the Syrian border.
Coalition officials have said that as many as 40 people were killed in the attack.
He said that video showing dead children killed was actually recorded in Ramadi, far from the attack scene.
An Iraqi man interviewed by The Associated Press as the bodies of women and children were unloaded from a truck for burial said they had gathered for a wedding celebration when they were attacked.
“There may have been some kind of celebration,” Kimmitt said. “Bad people have celebrations too. Bad people have parties too.”
Kimmitt said that troops did not find anything – such as a wedding tent, gifts, musical instruments, decorations or leftover food – that would indicate that a wedding had been held.
Most of the men there were of military age, and there were no elders present to indicate a family event, he said.
What was found, he said, indicated the building was used as a waypoint for foreign fighters crossing into Iraq from Syria to battle the coalition.
“The building seemed to be somewhat of a dormitory,” Kimmitt said. “You had over 300 sets of bedding gear in it. You had a tremendous number of pre-packaged clothing – apparently about a hundred sets of pre-packaged clothing; (It is) expected that when foreign fighters come in from other countries, they come to this location, they change their clothes into typical Iraqi clothing sets.”
At Saturday’s briefing for reporters in Baghdad, Kimmitt showed photos of what he said were binoculars designed for adjusting artillery fire, battery packs suitable for improvised explosive devices, several terrorist training manuals, medical gear, fake ID cards and ID card-making machines, passports and telephone numbers to other countries, including Afghanistan and Sudan.
None of the men killed in the raid carried ID cards or wallets, he said. “We feel that that was an indicator that this was a high risk meeting of high level anti-coalition forces. There was a tremendous number of incriminating pocket litter, a lot of telephone numbers to foreign countries, Afghanistan, Sudan and a number of others.”
Kimmitt said while the location was purported to be a sheep ranch, there was no evidence of ranching activities and no livestock.
He said that the coalition would continue to have an open mind about what might have happened, and he conceded there were some inconsistencies still to be worked out.
“The more that we look at intelligence, more we dig in, more we are persuaded no wedding,” Kimmitt said.
“We had significant, multiple sources of intelligence” before ordering the raid, he said.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/05/22/iraq.main/index.html
Who do you believe? the US occupation force, now very much famous for its horrific torture techniques on detainees and its blatant disregard for the Geneva Conventions… or the innocent Iraqi people who have seen nothing but destruction since the start of the war.
Wedding Party Massacre in Iraq](http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=5572) ZNet, 21 May 04
**Mahdi Nawaf shows photographs of his family members - father, wife and six children - killed in a US attack on what is claimed was a sleeping village Photograph: Anna Niedringhaus/AP The wedding feast was finished and the women had just led the young bride and groom away to their marriage tent for the night when Haleema Shihab heard the first sounds of the fighter jets screeching through the sky above. **
It was 10.30pm in the remote village of Mukaradeeb by the Syrian border and the guests hurried back to their homes as the party ended. As sister-in-law of the groom, Mrs Shihab, 30, was to sleep with her husband and children in the house of the wedding party, the Rakat family villa. She was one of the few in the house who survived the night.
“The bombing started at 3am,” she said yesterday from her bed in the emergency ward at Ramadi general hospital, 60 miles west of Baghdad. “We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one,” she said. She ran with her youngest child in her arms and her two young boys, Ali and Hamza, close behind. As she crossed the fields a shell exploded close to her, fracturing her legs and knocking her to the ground. She lay there and a second round hit her on the right arm. By then her two boys lay dead. “I left them because they were dead,” she said. One, she saw, had been decapitated by a shell. “I fell into the mud and an American soldier came and kicked me. I pretended to be dead so he wouldn’t kill me. My youngest child was alive next to me.”
Mrs Shibab’s description, backed by other witnesses, of an attack on a sleeping village is at odds with the American claim that they came under fire while targeting a suspected foreign fighter safe house.** She described how in the hours before dawn she watched as American troops destroyed the Rakat villa and the house next door, reducing the buildings to rubble. **
Iraq: The Wedding Party Massacre](http://www.sundayherald.com/42229) Sunday Herald, UK. 23 May 04
THE bombing started at 3am on Wednesday. The villagers from the tiny desert community of Makr al-Deeb were fast asleep, exhausted after a day spent celebrating a wedding. By the time the bombing had stopped and the advancing GIs had finished marauding and shooting their way through the remains of the village, the Americans had killed at least 42 innocent people. Among the dead were 27 members of the Rakat family who were celebrating a double family wedding. Many of their guests died as well, as did the band of musicians who played throughout the wedding and one of Iraq’s most popular singers, Hussein al-Ali from Ramadi. …
Problem is, OG, our boys already botched the handling of this case. So, even if they were right absolutely, we lost the PR battle. Too late. Perception matters more than tactical strength in this war. I guess we still haven't figured that out.
There's still plenty of room for doubt on this matter, though. And like I said earlier, if there were bad guys there, helo-mounted guns weren't the way to pick them out of a crowd.
Spoon dude,
I think you are right, we probably got this one right, but lost the PR war. The real bitc! of this is that from what I gather, most of the pictures coming out of Abu Graib were taken on one day, Nov 8th, a day when the US experienced one of the worst casualty days of the war. The trrops were pi$$ed and took it out on the inmates. But the loss of credibility because of those days is incredible.
The net result is that even if we are right, the credibility loss means we are wrong even if we can prove we are right. The "wedding story" sounds like pre-concocted for-media-consumption crap, but the peasants of western Iraq have more credibility than the CPA and the American military. Probably a successful op that will go against us rather than for us.... At least there will be a few less suicide bombers next week.
Shameful.
I don't want to believe people could intentionally do such a thing.
I wish not believing had the magic to erase .
I didn't want to believe U.S. soldiers abused prisoners...
but some did...
Someone said to me....
Well...why didn't they just shoot to kill them....
instead of incarcerating them???
I almost fell over. Huh?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by ravage: *
and then they had the gall to categorically state that it wasnt a wedding they had raided a terrorist hideout.
unfrikkin believable.
[/QUOTE]
But what if it was?