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The NSA's New Partner In Spying: Saudi Arabia's Brutal State Police
Advocatus Diaboli sends this news from The Intercept: The National Security Agency last year significantly expanded its cooperative relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Interior, one of the world's most repressive and abusive government agencies. An April 2013 top secret memo provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden details the agency's plans "to provide direct analytic and technical support" to the Saudis on "internal security" matters. The Saudi Ministry of Interior—referred to in the document as MOI— has been condemned for years as one of the most brutal human rights violators in the world. In 2013, the U.S. State Department reported that "Ministry of Interior officials sometimes subjected prisoners and detainees to torture and other physical abuse," specifically mentioning a 2011 episode in which MOI agents allegedly "poured an antiseptic cleaning liquid down [the] throat" of one human rights activist. The report also notes the MOI's use of invasive surveillance targeted at political and religious dissidents.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if the US didn't set this agency up in the first place. At the very least, we probably provided the initial training.
They won't look like the villains of the past.
Am I the only one who sees this as foreshadowing of the possible future for the U.S., assuming the NSA isn't reined in starting now?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
You become what you hate.
At least a country in middle east that have nothing to do with 911, of course...
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijackers_in_the_September_11_attacks
The NSA just aspires to that level of control.
Don't worry, America, your fascist state is well on its way.
The American regime is much cleverer than any dictatorship.
Insecure dictators try to silence everyone in advance, but it's much easier to monitor passively, drown the masses out, and deal only with the one or two individuals who get too loud. There is ideologically no difference between the USA and Saudi Arabia, and those who work for the signals monitoring services of either do so with the same oppressive goals in mind.
Thank goodness we topped that Iraqi-sponsored Afghan, though, eh?
AQ/ISIS is a great deal more brutal than is Saudi Arabia.
Had to go somewhere. http://www.thoughtcrime.org/bl...
...that this hasn't come up sooner.
I guess the NSA has given up on trying to be subtle.
Hey, you put your illegal spying program in my torture organization. No, you put your torture organization into my my illegal spying program. Wait...what? Oh, this is delicious!
For those too young: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
USA you're looking good baby YA BABY YAH!!!
When one of their enemies engage in the oppression of their own people. Otherwise if they are an ally of the United States, we don't give a shit about what they do to their own people. They can be Hitler reincarnate and as long as they support US interests, the USA will turn a complete and total blind eye to their rampant abuses.
Democracy, rights for woman, freedom of religion in Saudia Arabia, fuck that! They sell lots of oil and we'd better not tick them off!
Yep - 12 major terrorist plots foiled this week alone.
Be thankful for this.
And don't forget to check under the bed before you go to sleep.
Saudi Arabia is a corrupt, abusive, scumbag fucking regime that the US of A supports.
There WILL be NO peace in the Middle East or anywhere as long as the house of Saud is in charge.
Period.
No hope for Israel.
No hope for the Palestinians.
And no hope for our - the US of fucking A's - peace.
Do by invasive surveillance they mean something like what has happened to mean something like what it appears the NSA is involved with for James Walbert. Perhaps some nice extremely invasive tech as described here... http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
https://www.facebook.com/stephen.fletch
Pretty much.
This is why I kinda miss realpolitik, yeah it was cynical and calculating, but at least it was honest about it. The problem with a population focused on morality is ethics are a lot easier to twist and tug on emotions then pragmatism.
"The report also notes the MOI's use of invasive surveillance targeted at political and religious dissidents."
So, arguably less evil than western governments, who use invasive surveillance targeted at absolutely everyone.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
and weren't willing to play ball our way we'd decry them as a murderous regime.
So, according to the NSA watchlist, does that mean the US government and/or persons should be on the terrorist watch list? Oh wait, despite what the court says, who's going to enfore the constitition on the US government?
with a place like saudi arabia and all the bloody religious fanatic countries the ONLY thing we should export are BOOKS...books and fucking books again. And THEN after everyone damn reads them all and LEARN and understands how things works in a civilized world , we start to talk some actual business.... we are empowering states that if could have their way would bring humanity back to 1000AD... we are doing it thinking that we'll always have the upper hand....but if our side of the gear glitches.. I'lll be glad to see the heads of the military and politicians who enoforced these collaborations roll in the dust....
When that way to handle "dissidents" comes to your shores, won't be disclosed that it is happening, wannabe whisteblowers will be the first victims.
Since the CIA and Saudi worked together to organize 911, its only natural the relationship should continue...
The US government needs a strict law that disallows any aid of any kind or financial contacts with nations that use torture. No imports and no exports and no military or humanitarian aid as well as clauses that disallow work arounds by hiring a third party to deal with these nations. For example if either Israel or Palestine tortures just one person we would be required to hold them in total isolation regardless of any consequences. Nations such as we have seen in S. America that use torture through private contractors or commit crimes against humanity would also suffer severe and long lasting isolation. I mean right down to cutting the phone lines and telling them we will check back with them in 30 years to see if they are ready to associate with real human beings again.
So we'll be chummy with them too. We don't make friends based on human rights, we make friends based on greed: money, oil, power.
Saudi Arabia is ISIS, the only difference...Americans think "they are bastards, but they are our bastards".
Tat Tvam Asi
Why does the US government get along so swimmingly well with Saudia Arabia? The place is a human rights disaster. They support, directly or indirectly, various terrorist organizations. It's a lovely place...as long as you are a muslim male. Then you are free to preach strict abstinence and sexual fidelity - ok, sure, you drive over to Bahrain every Thursday to get drunk and get laid - but you make up for this by going home and oppressing your wives and daughters. What's not to like?
Of course, the US support has nothing to do with the fact that there is lots of oil money floating around. Lots of Saudi purchases from US companies, which just happen to have certain politicians on their boards, or which happen to make lots of contributions to campaign funds.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Translation: Saudi Arabia, the most oppressive industrialized nation, has outsourced torture training and sureveillance... to the USA!
Since this is Obama's NSA, and has been for over a term?
The National Security Agency last year {...}
Must find way to blame on Bush ... getting harder and harder ...
I hope these pages get released soon.. (not holding my breath) http://nypost.com/2013/12/15/i...
Dallas Real Estate
The book House of Bush, House of Saud explains that the Bush and Cheney families worked for the Saudis, who paid them billions for their help.
A few years ago a senior level well connected Saudi was soliciting geo information system engineering input on what drone or similar type platform could host networked tracking of mobile phones. Lot's of possible applications there, from targeting, surveillance tracking, countermeasures.
I felt at the time I might be playing with the devil. It was clear that there would have had to be some US authorization for this as they would probably need our satellites and co-ordination and integration so as not to be stepping on the toes of each other.
Instead of invading Iraq and Afghanistan, we would have nuked the Tora Bora fortress and then dismantled Saudi Arabia, doing whatever it might have taken to eliminate the Wahhabi influence on Islam.
It's called "Blowback". In order to prevent another 9/11/2001 or worse, it seems important to understand the motivations behind the first one (I'm using the year to distinguish from the US-supported 9/11/1973 coup in Chile). Like you, I also doubt the Saudi government had anything to do directly with funding that 9/11. In fact, that 9/11 seems more a protest against the Saudi government by Saudi citizens, but with the protest directed at the perceived source of funding for the Saudi government by the USA. Let's turn the political situation around hypothetically to try to understand the emotional aspect of it better, imagining what it might be like if the Saudi government was meddling directly in US affairs.
Here is a first cut at trying to understand the social/psychological dynamics of the situation from a different perspective. Imagine Saudi Arabia somehow was sending billions of dollars of campaign donations annually to the USA to keep in power an oppressive administration in the USA (passing laws forcing all US women to wear burkas, only allowing males with brown eyes to hold public office or get university degrees, and with capital punishment on suspicion of premarital sex or homosexuality). Also, imagine that there were millions of Saudi soldiers stationed in US states to ensure a flow of manufactured goods to Saudi Arabia despite strikes and other unrest in the USA and nearby countries. Also imagine that the Saudis were also funding Japanese people who, from fear of earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, had moved to Canada, bought a lot of the land, claimed a right to govern all of Canada because some Japanese people had moved to Canada 10,000 years ago across the land bridge from Siberia, and then forced most non-Japanese Canadian citizens in all of Canada to flee to the USA and were killing non-Japanese Canadians who remained and resisted the Japanese occupation. If you are a US citizen in such a hypothetical world, would you be at all upset by such a situation whatever your eye color? Imagine that some very upset and frustrated young US citizens decide to protest this situation by attacking some big buildings in Saudi Arabia by hijacking airliners to show how unhappy they are with Saudi government foreign policy and to show how they felt their hopes and dreams for a good life in the USA had been thwarted by Saudi meddling in US government. Imagine this attack is then used by Saudi Arabia to justify invading Mexico (where some of the hypothetical American hijackers trained) and Brazil (because it is claimed by the Saudis to have WMDs that hypothetical young Americans might use against Saudis). Imagine the Saudis then start supplying "intelligence" to the US government from listening to all US telephone calls about specific US citizens who might be unhappy about the situation and perhaps plotting unrest in the USA or planning more blowback against the Saudis.
Now flip this scenario around and back to reality (US funding Saudis and Israel and US troops in the Middle East) and does the fact the almost all of the 9/11 hijackers were frustrated young Saudi men make more sense?
Soon after 9/11 I saw an analysis in a magazine (maybe the Atlantic or New Yorker) of why the hijackers did what they did. I have not seen many such articles since. The point made there was that these were mostly young men whose hopes for significant advancement in Saudi society had seemed thwarted and they were led to blame the USA for that, because the USA was propping up the Saudi regime and otherwise meddling in the Middle East. Of course, being promised eternal bliss in "paradise" for becoming murderers can not be ignored as a related aspect of religious fundamentalism (including outrage about the occupation of Palestine), so there are layers of complexity here for that and other reasons. The motivations of the hijackers themselves may also be somewhat different than the motivations of the organizers at higher levels.
See also:
http://en
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You have the most heavily armed police and the most invasive and sophisticated domestic spying network, and you call others brutal? totalitarian?
Never have any country in human history capable of doing what you're doing now.
The obsession of ISIS with killing Shias flows directly from the top.
http://agonist.org/how-saudi-a...
This post highlights the possibility that the NSA could spy on Americans in America by working with a foreign partner to act as a proxy in exchange for the NSA spying on their people, sort of like wife-swapping. Obviously, it would not be Saudi Arabia, as they lack the resources for such a grand effort. However, the British could do it quite well. More importantly, it fits with the American business trend of outsourcing and off-shoring work. As for Saudi Arabia, they see like a good place to outsource 'enhanced interrogation'. It would be ironic, too, given that we have so many Americans who would be more than qualified to do the dirty work. I guess they could move to Riyadh.