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Pentagon Confirms Cyber Command, Under NSA Control
eldavojohn writes "The Pentagon's been planning a cyber command for a while now but it's just been confirmed. The Pentagon will set up a Cyber Command outfit most likely around — surprise surprise — Fort George G. Meade in Maryland. From the article, 'The head of the Cyber Command would also be the director of the U.S. National Security Agency, which conducts electronic surveillance and communications interception and is also based at Fort Meade.' The Air Force has been no stranger to digital warfare."
Is it just me, or does it seem like the U.S. is being foolish about over-concentrating its forces?
The NSA, FBI, CIA, Pentagon, and Pres/VP are all in/near D.C.
It seems like just one or two nukes could make the U.S. nearly incapable of defending itself against a serious attack.
If there's one or two nukes in DC, we're not in a "US defending itself against a serious attack" scenario, we're in an "end of human civilization as we know it" scenario. There's plenty of folks elsewhere in the country who will be around to push the button.
First one to add Cyber Command to their botnet gets 10 internet points!
Is this when Skynet takes over? I'm not ready for Judgment Day. I just signed a 6 month lease on my apartment...I can't walk away from a commitment like that.
And if the country invading us had put that dictator into power and then strangled our country with sanctions for a decade, suddenly accused him of atrocities they had allowed while they were sponsoring him, bombed our entire nation into pieces under pretense and lies, destroyed our national security by dismissing the entirety of our former armed forces, allowed terrorists to flood in from every direction, stood by idly while mobs destroyed our infrastructure, bombed our streets and cities so no one had access to clean water, proper sewage, or electricity, took control of our local natural resources and handed them over to private corporations from their home country, invited foreigners to buy up our land while it was cheap, built over seven permanent military bases worth over billion dollars each from border to border, and had mercenaries with no legal oversight roaming the streets with machine guns and RPGs, I guess you'd just sit there and take it?
Interesting.
Tell me again how we played a part in this?
Try 1963.
The coup that brought the Ba'ath Party to power in 1963 was celebrated by the United States.
The CIA had a hand in it. They had funded the Ba'ath Party - of which Saddam Hussein was a young member - when it was in opposition.
US diplomat James Akins served in the Baghdad Embassy at the time.
"I knew all the Ba'ath Party leaders and I liked them," he told me.
"The CIA were definitely involved in that coup. We saw the rise of the Ba'athists as a way of replacing a pro-Soviet government with a pro-American one and you don't get that chance very often.
"Sure, some people were rounded up and shot but these were mostly communists so that didn't bother us".
This happy co-existence lasted right through the 1980s.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/2694885.stm
UN != US.
You have no idea of how politics work between the two if you believe that. We told them if they didn't follow us into a Iraq, they would be a debating society, right? Do you think the UN does anything the United States vetoes? Are you fucking serious?
Are you really saying that there were no atrocities?
I'm saying we gave him the weapons to complete the atrocities, and that we didn't say anything about it while we watched them happen.
Try some elementary moral exercises in your brain, if you can. Very quickly you'll discover that "the enemy of the enemy is my friend" has come back to haunt us so many times it's now sheer irony to watch any international political event involving the United States.
Wow. A few bits of information. Consider them fact or call them a lie, but they kind of contradict your post and back up the parent. Almost 30 years of intervention in Iraq, leading up to the first Gulf War. Citation
1963 -
"To pave the way for the new regime, the CIA is claimed to have provided to the Baathists lists of suspected Communists and other leftists. The new regime is claimed to have used these lists to orchestrate a bloodbath, systematically murdering untold numbers of Iraq's educated eliteâ"killings in which Saddam Hussein himself is said to have participated. The victims included hundreds of doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military and political figures.[28][31][32] According to an article in the New York Times, the U.S. sent arms to the new regime, weapons later used against the same Kurdish insurgents the U.S. supported against Kassem and then abandoned. American and U.K. oil and other interests, including Mobil, British Petroleum and Bechtel, were once again conducting business in Iraq."
1968 -
"Roger Morris in the Asia Times writes that the CIA deputy for the Middle East Archibald Roosevelt (grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and cousin of Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.) stated, referring to Iraqi Ba'ath Party officers on his payroll in the 1963 and 1968 coups, "They're our boys, bought and paid for, but you always gotta remember that these people can't be trusted."[20] General Ahmed Bakr was installed as president. Saddam Hussein was appointed the number two man."
1980 -
"Investigative journalist Robert Parry reports that in a secret 1981 memo summing up a trip to the Middle East, then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig wrote: "It was also interesting to confirm that President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran through Prince Fahd" of Jordan." "
1980s to '92 -
"A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former U.S. policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in arming Iraq. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous dual use items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague. Opinions differ among Middle East experts and former government officials about the pre-Iraqi tilt, and whether Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons of mass destruction. "Fundamentally, the policy was justified," argues David Newton, a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, who runs an anti-Hussein radio station in Prague. "We were concerned that Iraq should not lose the war with Iran, because that would have threatened Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. Our long-term hope was that Hussein's government would become less repressive and more responsible."
[...]
"Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam," said Joe Wilson, Glaspie's former deputy at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the last U.S. official to meet with Hussein. "Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behavior. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation."
According to reports of the U.S. Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, the U.S., under the successive presidential administrations sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992. The chairman of the Senate committee, Don Riegle, said: "The executive branch of our government approved 771 different export licences for sale of dual-use technology to Iraq. I think its a devastating record."
[...]
"U.S. officials publicly condemned Iraq's employment of mu