Reply #3: Wow. What an utterly transparent, pedantic smokescreen.

[Heimdallr]

Such a system is not difficult or expensive to install. In fact, the detector buoys that monitor tsunamis have been available for decades and the U.S. has had a monitoring system in place for more than half a century.

Absolutely. No doubt about it.

A mere half million dollars could have provided an early warning system that could have saved thousands of lives.

Then why didn't the Indian gov't supply one?

This should be compared to the $1,500,000,000 the U.S. spends every day to fund the Pentagon war machine.

Then why didn't the Indian gov't supply one?

This means that for what the U.S. is spending for less than one second of bombing and destruction it could construct a system that could have prevented thousands of needless deaths.

Then why didn't the Indian gov't supply one?

Lack of funding for an inexpensive, low-tech early warning system is simply criminal negligence.

On the part of the increasingly wealthy and incredibly corrupt Indian gov't.

Indian Minister of State for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal said, “If the country had such an alert system in place, we could have warned the coastal areas of the imminent danger and avoided the loss of life.”

Then why didn't in the hell didn't the Indian gov't supply one?

But there is no room in the Bush budget for such life-saving measures; the U.S. government's priorities are corporate profit and endless war.

Sorry, like Bush or hate Bush, the above statement is bullshit, and is a childish attempt to politicize this tragedy (and that of India's lack of foresight and action) in terms of the Iraq Invasion.

Disgusting.

U.S. government failed to warn region

Rhetorical question for the gullible: And exactly who would they have warned, what system is in place to do this, and what could the warned parties have done, in what amount of time, to what effect?