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Richard Clarke on Cyberterrorism and Iraq
An anonymous reader writes "Richard Clarke, former counter terrorism advisor to the US National Security Council, has revealed that before invading Iraq, the U.S. government used the Internet to communicate directly with Iraqi soldiers by sending them personalised messages saying, "We're about to invade. We're going to overwhelm you and if you resist us we're going to kill you. But we don't want to do that. So really the best thing for you to do when we invade is to go home." He said the soldiers got the message and most of them went home. Clarke, who many will remember for publicly criticizing the Bush administration, also emphasized the importance of cybersecurity. "Just because it doesn't create a lot of body bags, doesn't mean it's not important. It's vitally important for our economies," Clarke said."
(emphasis mine)
Every single poll I've seen has more than 95% of iraqis wanting this.
I'd like to see your source for these polls. This isn't a troll, it's an honest question. You've seen one thing, I've seen something completely different.
Who am I? Why, I'm a Marine who got back from Iraq not long ago. The folks we met were nice and seemed very thankful we were there, the kids especially. The only place we weren't really welcome was in the Sunni Triangle area which is full of old Saddam loyalists who had everything to lose a nothing to gain with Saddam being kicked out.
Why should we be there fighting the desires of the Iraqi people?
Speaking as someone who's been in country and not just reading what CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC is reporting, I find it hard to believe you can ask such a question. The vast majority of the country was tired of being ruled by Saddam and his religious minority. The only way he stayed in power was by intimidation, and the people he intimidated are very happy he's gone. They're doubly happy we're there to prevent his lieutenants from trying to re-establish Ba'athist strongholds and continue his "reign."
If our goal was to get rid of Sadam, we've already done that, so why stick around?
See last two sentences in previous paragraph.
Oh, the real reason is so we can steal their oil. And I do mean steal.
If there's oil theft going on, it's not coming from the Americans. There aren't lines of Texaco supertankers sitting at port just greedily sucking the country dry all so Bush and Halliburton can make a buck. Iraqi oil is being sold to whoever wants it at market prices, the same as in Saudi, the same as in Russia and South America. If we're stealing their oil, precisely why are we paying for it? That kind of goes against the definition of stealing, don't you think?
Plus, most iraqis I've heard interviewed prefer Sadaam to the US. They say things like "at least Sadaam was an Iraqi."
If you did nothing but interview in the Sunni triangle, such reponses would be expected. I'd be shocked if it were otherwise. But outside the Sunni areas it's an entirely different story. You don't hear that story very much because the news organizations are fixated on where the problems are, not where things are going great. Blood and gore sells, but kids going to a newly-opened school don't sell. Roadside bombs boost ratings, but nobody cares whether a water treatment plant or a power plant is back online again. Insurgents shooting RPG's at our Bradley's get lots of airtime, but the kids in the streets giving soldiers and Marines food and water with smiles and thanks gets no screen time at all. You can claim it doesn't happen but I'm willing to bet you haven't been there. I have.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
That's not true. Might I point to the examples of, say the Malayan Emergency, or the reasonably successful Australian-led stabilisation operation in East Timor after their independence referendum (where you had a bunch of Indonesian-supported thugs wreaking havoc). Why did these operations succeed? By most reports, they did a lot better job of keeping the local populace on side.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Where in Iraq did you serve? What unit? The "Sunni Triangle" contains about 4 million people. And it excludes the equally-if-not-more dangerous Sadr City, of ~3 million people.
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.. is back online again
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What sort of selection bias did you have? I.e., if you served in the Green Zone, you're not exactly going to be encountering those hostile to you very much, just as diplomats in Saigon didn't exactly find most people there to express hatred to their face. In fact, when the US began evacuating from Vietnam, the helicopters were swarmed with US supporters trying to escape the country.
> There aren't lines of Texaco supertankers
> sitting at port
Read Order 36 by Bremer.
> I'd be shocked if it were otherwise
Be shocked.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5217874/site/newswe
> kids going to a newly-opened school
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0628/p01s02-woiq.
Lovely school job there.
> water treatment plant
You mean, like the one that we opened that was immediately hit by a suicide bomber trying to kill the US troops on site?
> power plant
Like how the country's energy is far *lower* than before the war? I can get you graphs if you want. It's especially bad right now.
In short, you need to quit spinning and look at the numbers. Another number you might be interested in: 98,000
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.c
Please discuss the methodology if you wish to complain about it; note that if you find fault in its methodology, you also need to fault pretty much every third world epidemiology study out there.
The *special* hell.
Richard Clarke made repeated attempts at trying to show Condoleeza Rice and Bush that Al-Qaeda was a major threat; the April 2001 date was one of the times where he brought up the topic with the Bush administration, only to be ignored and brushed aside.
m ission/
... We could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance. "
After the book came out (and I'm not doubting some things were stretched to sell more copies), numerous news agencies asked Condoleeza Rice about whether Richard Clarke had pleaded with the Bush administration; she can't seem to recall any of those NSC meetings - odd considering her position has National Security Adviser to the president.
See CNN here: http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/03/24/911.com
Slate has a great op-ed piece too:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2097685/
"To an unusual degree, the Bush people can't get their story straight. On the one hand, Condi Rice has said that Bush did almost everything that Clarke recommended he do. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's show, acted as if Clarke were a lowly, eccentric clerk: "He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff." This is laughably absurd. Clarke wasn't just in the loop, he was the loop."
Another great tidbit:
"The Principals meeting, which Clarke urgently requested during Bush's first week in office, did not take place until one week before 9/11. In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke spelled out the significance of this delay. He contrasted July 2001 with December 1999, when the Clinton White House got word of an impending al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles International Airport and Principals meetings were called instantly and repeatedly:
In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew [but] never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI.
Deceptive. Not surprising, coming from USAID. Here's a running graph from the CPA:
r 9. pdf
_ it em&itemid=345
http://www.iraqcoalition.org/ES/consolidated/Ap
It goes up to the last day that they made CPA graphs like this (April 9th).
Furthermore, the "prewar" numbers don't mention that this is discussing "immediately before we invaded". Before we flattened Iraq's power infrastructure in the first gulf war, they produced 9500 MW. On Thursday, Iraq's acting minister of Electricity stated that current electricity production ranges between 3,600 and 4,000 MW:
http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show
It's particularly bad right now because several oil installations have been hit, both power and gasoline are in short supply.
The *special* hell.