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Terrorists Move to Cyberspace
Dreamwalkerofyore writes "The Washington Post has an article on how Al Quaeda is now using the 'net for its new HQ. From the article: 'With laptops and DVDs, in secret hideouts and at neighborhood Internet cafes, young code-writing jihadists have sought to replicate the training, communication, planning and preaching facilities they lost in Afghanistan with countless new locations on the Internet.'"
This is like saying Microsoft is an Internet entity. Its true, up to a point, but like every Internet entity it requires physical infrastructure to survive. Afghanistan wasn't just harboring OBL and giving him rack space for his servers, it also provided physical security and space for terrorist training camps for that certain tactical expertise you can't quite get from playing Counterstrike (he also had a $6 million house next to the Kabul airport -- gack, I wish I lived my life "on the run" like that).
Even to the extend Al Quaeda is a "brand"/"franchise system of terror" it relies on personal, face-to-face communication between the franchisees and a semi-centralized infrastructure. The London bombers, for example, got their instructions at a face-to-face meeting in Pakistan. (http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/LondonBlasts/story?id=9 40198&page=1 )
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Due to the distributed and international nature of the Internet, it just isnt possible for governments to take action against the publicly accessible al-qaeda sites. My question is this: why haven't US and UK based hackers taken action against these sites? It certainly seems like a slightly more productive use of time and energy than writing viruses.
I can think of a plausible justification for invading Iraq when we did.
as an Iraqi refuge told me well before 9-11, Saddam and Bin Laden were not allies, Al Queda wants a government based on Islam, Saddam wanted a government based on Saddam.
Saddam's power base was slowly weakening, the well trained and fed troops that he had in the prior conflict were getting older, and being replaced by children who grew up undernourished, and undereducated during the Sanctions.
With Al Queda being crushed in Afghanistan, many of it's members fled into Iraq, which had the convenient situation of no being helpful to the US, while Saddam was rapidly losing control.
Consider if Saddams government collapsed without American intervention; who would be there to grab the reins of power? Islamic Extremists, backed by Al Queda, ready to bomb, murder, and terrorize anyone who wanted an actual representitive government, just as they are doing now.
The U.S. wouldn't have an excuse to intervene after the revolution, because Saddam would have been deposed, the new government would claim to represent the people, and by claiming a basis in Islam, any attack would be claimed an attack against Islam.
So, if that scenario were about to come to pass, the time to begin an occupation of Iraq would be before the revolution not after.
There is no way the U.S. government would describe their intercession as preventing the formation of a self-described 'Islamic State' as doing so would incur the wrath of far more groups than having a stated reason of "deposing a tyrant", "protecting the region", "WMD's", "Terrorists", etc.
So these other reasons were made up, and used interchangably. In case one of them proved invalid, the other reasons would still justify going to war.
The biggest surprise to me was that some covert group didn't plant WMD components in Iraq to be 'Discovered', I thought it was almost certian we would find WMD's if they existed or not.
We still fall back on the idea of pre-emptive war, and if it's wrong to kill tens of thousands of people over a 'what if'; but it sure looks like there are a lot of terrorist bomber types hanging out in Iraq that don't need Saddam to tell them to kill and terrorise people.
Fortunetly, radical Islam is dying: Terrorism is like the kid who knocks over the game board when he's losing, the philosophy of "If I can't win, then nobody wins." and the 9/11 attacks were like punching a hornets nest because you're allergic to hornets. Osama, to me, seems like a spoiled brat; rich parents, thinking he's the center of the world, he's right, everyone else is wrong, and all. If he actually had the support of the Islamic people, Al Queda would have an Army, not a few guys with boxcutters and makeshift bombs.
"The leaders are well-educated professionals with money and degrees. The people who actually blow themselves up are the ones who aren't good for much else."
Not always.
Many of those who actually carried out the attacks on 9/11 were very well-educated and recruited from universities in Europe. Mohammed Atta for one, possessed a doctorate...in Urban Planning and Preservation.
My little brother (Marine sniper) found terrorist hideouts complete with tortured Iraqis chained to bloddy walls and CDROMs laying around with .wmvs of said torture. Don't know about connectivity. Sure it was sneakernet.
This guy is way out there
That's great. We had a chance to send in a few thousand counterterrorist assassins. Infiltrate their groups as did John Walker Lindh and other Euramericans. When they were still small and clustered in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Horn of Africa and a few other places (like Berlin, LA, NY/NJ), even after the 9/11/2001 planebombings. Instead we sent in thousands of troops, made a mess of the place, added Iraq to the blunder, and scattered the seeds. In fact we kicked the hornet's nest, rather than inject it with poison. Now we've multiplied them, mutated them, and handed them media victory after victory, so their obscure gang of assholes is now global and famous. We've got that moron Bush and his sadistic death marketers, never out of the safety of their air-conditioned offices and SUVs, up against bin Laden, his lieutenants, and a gang of desperate assholes with nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Now that the war is on the Net, where lives are not actually on the line, we have a second chance. We're supposedly the masters of the mediasphere. We can crank out orchestrated media campaigns to actually win infowar battles, winning consumers of our brand: liberty. Of course, we have to get our message straight: drop some of this "trade our rights for security" crap that makes us look like the Christian Taliban. We have to stop torturing prisoners, invading countries "because we can", and hiding behind nonsense like "we're not as bad as Saddam".
Rounds 1 and 2 we handed to the Qaeda, preferring to stick to our old Cold War scripts. If we don't win Round 3, now that they've cashed in on popularity and financial backers around the world, we'll have lost the infowar - and we're already starting down on the mat. If we go into Round 4 friendless, outnumbered, looking evil and deeply divided inside our borders, we'll never get a chance. It'll be the theofascists by a knockout, and our steroid-inflated body will get picked clean by the vultures.
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make install -not war
"free thinkers"
I think he meant the people that question WHY the terrorists are such a big threat.
Am I the only person who notices that the ONLY times terrorists strike public sites outside of the warzones are when support for the war drops?
Could it be that the governments are doing this to scare the fools and sheep back in line when they start dissenting? It seems entirely too convenient that terrorists would kill the very people who disagree with the attacks on their homeland.
The communists did this too, as do most authoritarian governments (which the christian fascist / aka republican movement, is).
Read 1984 for a good insight by a guy who actually lived in those periods of fear of communism, etc. The only SAD thing about that book, is that "doublethink" is practiced by most people today to ignore that they need to be involved. "someone else will change things, I can keep swilling beer and getting fatter on my couch... if I get fat enough, I'll hopefully not die on my way to buy Stacker2 pills. Oh, and Long live corporate america, who sells our livelihood to foreign enemies to keep their costs down."
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler