US State Department Hacks Al-Qaeda Websites In Yemen

shuttah writes "In the growing Al-Qaeda activity in Yemen, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed today that 'cyber experts' had recently hacked into web sites being used by an Al-Qaeda affiliate, substituting the group's anti-American rhetoric with information about civilians killed in terrorist strikes. Also this week, a statement from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs revealed the presence an Al-Qaeda video calling for 'Electronic Jihad.'"

Comments

Re:...Huh?

[fustakrakich]

...terrorist websites instead of the websites of Western governments and businesses?

You mean there's a difference?

Re:Think of the Civilians!

[ArcherB]

Seems like a pretty hypocritical message, considering all the civilians we've killed over there. In a place where we shouldn't even have military.

The difference is the target and the intent. When we kill civilians, it's truly by accident. They usually die because a weapon malfunctioned or they were too close to a government building. We also tend to apologize for it and in many cases, notify the civilian population before an attack occurs.. In Iraq, for example, the goal was to free the people there from a tyrant.

Of course, you may disagree with this, but if an Iraqi were to disagree with his government in 2001, they would die. They are free to disagree today. What makes you so special that you deserve freedoms like this and others don't? I served, by the way, not to give you freedoms. You already have them. I served, knowing full well that when I signed, I would be giving those that have not rights the very freedoms that you and I have.

When Al Qaeda kills civilians, the civilians are the target. There is no warning before hand and no apology afterwards. The goal of Al Qaeda is not to free the population, but to convert or enslave them. If you are a Christian, Al Qaeda wants to you convert or die. If you are an atheist, Al Qaeda wants you to convert or die. If you are a Jew, Al Qaeda wants you to die.

Re:They did it...

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

It is a matter of record and fact: The US kills more innocent civilians in Yemen - or anywhere else, for that matter - than do any alleged 'al-qaeda' affiliates.

Jeremy Scahill, National Security reporter for The Nation:

"Saleh essentially made an agreement with the Obama administration to get an increase in his counterterrorism funding in return for allowing the United States to conduct various operations of its own, unilaterally. And so, effectively, counterterrorism funding for his regime became like crack cocaine. Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world. His government was extremely corrupt. This was their cash cow, claiming that they were fighting terrorism.

And so what you've seen over the past 10, 12 years of history between the United States and Yemen is Ali Abdullah Saleh, when it was convenient for him, allowing the al-Qaida threat to flare up, looking the other way when 23 al-Qaida people broke out of the prison that they were supposed to be held in, actually allowing weapons to be smuggled into al-Qaida areas so that they would attack a police station, and then coming back to the United States and saying, oh, we really need more funding to go and fight these terrorists."

" the United States has sort of outsourced its intelligence operations in Yemen to Saudi Arabia and Yemen's security forces. And we've seen repeatedly over the past 10 years the Saudis and the Yemenis manipulate events regarding al-Qaida within Yemen to try to curry favor with the United States or to get more funding.

And so I just would sort of reserve commentary, as a reporter who's covered Yemen extensively and been there, on going too far down the line of guessing who this agent was, who he was working for, and what he actually did, because I've seen it too many times where someone's getting played, or someone's getting spun."

"Colleagues of mine who are in the south of Yemen right now and are on really the front lines of this drone war, my friend Iona Craig, who's a great reporter for the Times of London, was just saying to me that she met civilians who were severely burned from the drone strikes and that one civilian that she talked to said there were 26 people killed in the strike that he survived and was severely burned in."

"the U.S. bombed this village and killed 46 people, and we know the names of all of the people that were killed. I went there myself. I interviewed a woman who lost her entire family. An old man, 17 of those 46 people that were killed were members of his family. There were five pregnant women among the dead."

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/17/152854335/why-the-u-s-is-aggressively-targeting-yemen