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Finding an ISIS Training Camp Using Google Earth
An anonymous reader writes: Terrorist organization ISIS has been in the news a lot lately for their hostile activities in Iraq and Syria. They've also been very active online, posting propaganda and photos on various social networking sites to try to recruit more members. Frequently, they'll have pictures of themselves in nondescript locations — but even carefully selected images give clues to a real location. Citizen journalists at Bellingcat analyzed a group of these photos, comparing buildings and bridges in the background to images from Google Earth. With very little to go on, they were able to pinpoint the location of a terrorist training camp.
All I see is a big smoking crater..
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
come get us....we can't get to you, yet.
The one guy had a British accent, so I'm pretty sure no dentist in the picture. /justkiddingcantyoulimeystakeajoke
crowdsourcing and internet slething just worked out so well for IDing the Boston Bombers, right?
Seriously, after that sawing off a live man's head, I have NO problem with blowing these assholes away. In fact, I would be happy to pull the trigger to launch.
Now, the real question is, did this interfere with an on-going operation? I would hate to think that showing them how easy it is to find out info from their propaganda would stop its flow.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you RTFA, you'd see that they referenced ISIS PR videos, so it's not just "oh that looks like it might be training camp" but "these geo features from the videos correspond exactly to this thing here on the map" type of analysis.
They've been just IS for some time now. And if I'm not mistaken, the last S in ISIS stands for Sham, which is Arabic for Levant. And they claim that the Caliphate has been established.
Democracy is for the people; you only vote once per season and we'll do the rest of the work for you don't have to.
http://www.dispatch.com/conten...
I'm not sure Obama can politically afford to get too carried away with bombing ISIS. Whether it is true or not, there is plenty of talk that Obama allowed this to happen by not keeping troops in Iraq longer. He blames the Iraqi government for not updating the SOFA agreements but people have been claiming that Hillary (presumable under Obama's orders) kept increasing demands that couldn't be met by the Iraqi government. He then declared his campaign promise has been realized and ended the war on terror to boot.
So how does he go back and say the war on terror is not over, how does he come back and say we need to go back into Iraq after claiming the people foreseeing this were nutters, how does he do this without giving credibility to all those decrying our exist from the world or who said if we did not lead in Syria, something evil would fill the void. The problem is, he seems to believe that if we mind our own business, the world will not hate us, will not want to kill us, and situations like this will not exist.
Now I will admit that all that may not be 100% true, but it is the perception people are getting and it is the perception he seems to be afraid of when he has to acknowledge his foreign policy was a failure, that his plans for peace didn't work. This is what he is up with, he is either claimed to be wrong on everything and allow it to happen, or he has to admit he was wrong and do something about it that goes against what he seems to believe.
I dropped that comic because it does appear that he is more occupied playing golf than the problems in the world. But to be fair, if you can golf somewhat well, it is a relaxing and peaceful time in which you can actually think things through. This is probably why so much business gets done on the gold course.
Drone target-selection via popular vote on Reddit in 3, 2, 1....
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Well he can't run for re-election and that tends to let second term Presidents do things they normally wouldn't do for fear of negatively impacting the next election. The world cannot continue using the earlier Iraqi and Afghanistan wars as an excuse to completely oppose all potential military involvement in any future situation. When making the decision on whether to commit military forces each situation needs to be evaluated separately and on it's own merits. The ISIS threat needs to be destroyed using any means possible. US air support, spec ops teams, and military advisers are working with both the Iraqi and Kurdish ground forces. It's a low risk strategy for the US military and the Iraqi and Kurd ground forces are doing the lions share of the fighting and dying. After all it's their country and their people. In the past the US provided a no-fly zone to protect the Kurds from retaliation by Saddam Hussein after the 1991 Iraqi War. The people in that region are probably the only ones in the world who actually has a favorable opinion on the US. That fact alone is reason enough to try and help them now. Normally I don't think the US should get involved in any military conflicts unless US interests are realistically and directly threatened. There is currently no country in the world worth the loss of even one US soldier. However, in this particular case I am willing to set that requirement aside and support the destruction of a truly despicable group of serial killers.