Scahill is a well known and respected journalist. His book has pictures of McRaven visiting the surviving family members and slaughtering a sheep to beg forgivness of the family. NATO and JSOC have fully admitted that it was a mistake, and that there was an attempt to cover it up. The fundemental problem they had covering it up was the targets were so amazingly, obviously wrong, a police chief and a prosecutor, there were so many witnesses who survived, journalist were on scene fairly quickly and the attempted cover up was so obvious it fell apart immediately.
It would lead you to beleive that there are probably a significant number of "accidents" where the victims are not well known, there are no surviving witnesses, journalists can't reach the scene, or the victims are all pulverized by explosives and unidentifiable so they JSOC can get away with one coverup after another.
You do realize the people operating those drones are hiding among civilians too don't you? They go home to the spouse and kids when they get off work. Would you be upset if someone lobbed a cruise missile full of cluster bombs in to those towns?
The father of the Chinese space program was one of the founders of JPL, Jet Propulsion == rockets. The U.S. government hounded him so much for being Chinese, and possibly a spy, he eventually returned home to China and built a space program there.
The rest of your thesis is deeply flawed and NOT insightful. The U.S. space program is alive and well at JPL, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital Sciences and a number of other private companies.
The only thing that went wrong was letting a series of U.S. Presidents, Congress and NASA completely screw it up for a few decades. Space programs need to be run by visionaries with a plan, laser focus, sufficient resources and the capacity to stick with it even when its hard, so they acheive their goals. Von Braun was the visionary who made Apollo happen. Musk is the most likely visionary to get the U.S. to Mars first.
The space program as run by the U.S. government and NASA is doomed, if for no other reason than they completely change the strategy every 4 to 8 years, and their strategic decisions are based on how many jobs will be created in the districts of powerful Congressmen, not sound or rational engineering or whether a project is worth doing. As a result NASA seldom ever finishes anything (outside of JPL and observatories).
NASA is also never held accountable for failure to finish anything, partially because politcians always cancel the programs half way through right before they actually have to build and do something. NASA's staff need to propose projects that are well engineered and worth doing, tell Congress to fund them at a sufficient and sustained level to finish them, and if Congress and President wont they need to threaten to mass resign. If NASA can't do programs like that they should all mass resign, shutter the failed parts of the organization and put the money directly in to places like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences.
So you are saying that if a friend of yours is a terrorist, unbeknownst to you, you are OK with the U.S. government executing you without a trial.
You may not know this but Bin Laden's father is an affluent, respected owner of a multi billion dollar Saudi construction company. As far we anyone knows he disowned his son and had no ties to terrorism. By your reasoning the U.S. should still execute him and all of his relatives?
You either have rule of law or you don't. Rule of law says you are accountable for your actions not the actions of people you happen to know or share a blood line with. Rule of law says you produce evidence of someone's wrong doing to a judge and jury and they decided if the evidence warrants punishment.
The key point is I'm NOT the one who took this thread off topic, you were doing it before I did so don't pin it on me.
I think I made it pretty clear that in at least one case the U.S. has someone disappear from the U.S. I've also made the probably even more disturbing point that he U.S. has managed to bestow on itself the power to not only make people disappear in the U.S. but anywhere on the planet, which is far more disturbing and surpasses the powers of any previous police state.
JSOC is operating in at least 100 countries and they are accountable to no one other than maybe the White House and the SecDef occasionally. They are operating as judge, jury, torturer and executioner. There are no checks or balances and they are FREQUENTLY either making serious mistakes or serious errors in judgement.
There is a big difference between collateral damage on a declared battlefield and indiscriminate killing of civilians where the whole world is a battlefield and innocent civilians have no where to hide.
I'll say again you should read Scahill's book. Awliki's story is far more complex than it appears or U.S. propaganda painted it. Awkliki was actually very moderate before 9/11. He supported George W in 2000 because he was socially conservative and liked the hard line Republican stance on gays and other social issues. He was also the goto Muslim for U.S. media after 9/11 because of his moderation and appeals for calm.
His story then gets very murky after 9/11. There is at least some evidence the U.S. tried to coerce in to being an informant. In particular they may have snared him in two staged prostitution stings to pressure and discredit him. They hounded him relentless post 9/11 and he was dismayed at the brutal treatement Muslim's were getting in the U.S. He tried to return to the U.S. and was held at the border and then was suddenly released by the FBI to enter the U.S. He apparently went directly to someone the FBI wanted him to help implicate and he didn't even know. He was probably be coerced in to being an informant. He then fled the U.S. to never return because he didn't want to be an informant. When he returned to his ancestral home in Yemen the hounding continued under U.S. direction, he was imprisoned by Yemen for a time, and his radicationlization accellerated.
He was most definitely very radical when he was finally executed, but there is at least a 50/50 chance he was radicalized only because of 10 years of hounding and pressure applied by the U.S.
Still the fact that you think its OK to execute children based on the actions of their parents show just how morally challenged you and the U.S. government have become.
If U.S. citizens are guilty of something, try them in absentia in a court of law, put your evidence on the table and if you can convince a judge and jury then you have justification to act.
If you let the executive branch act as judge, jury and executioner you are opening a Pandora's box that all Americans will live to regret.
You seem to miss the point. U.S. indiscriminant killing of civilians is insuring this will be a perpetual war, which I suspect is what a lot of malevolent people in and around Washington D.C. want. This forever war spanning the entire globe gives them a blank check to do just about anything, anywhere, anytime and justify it by saying its necessary to keep American's safe. If the screw up and kill the wrong people they just lie, cover it up, and move on to the next set of executions. They can also spend unlimited quantities of money. After the Soviet Union fell DOD and Intelligence needed a new enemy to justify their enormous budgets. Now that they have one they will milk it forever.
You can't win a guerrilla war by working off an org chart of your enemy commanders and killing large numbers of civilians as collateral damage as you go after them. The French tried exactly this strategy in Algeria for years. They did take out a lot of boxes on their org charts but the brutality that went with it insured there was always a fresh supply of people who hated the French with a passion and constantly replenished the boxes on the org chart.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with targetting Al Qaeda and Taliban but you need to A) make sure the intelligence and targetting are rock solid and B) do everything possible to limit collateral damage. For example you kill them in vehicles on an open road instead of leveling an entire village full of innocent people.
Or you send in special operators to snatch and identify them. Unfortunately after 10 years they've realized that secret prisons are really messy from a human rights perspective so they've decided to use summary executions instead which is why they killed an unarmed Bin Laden at point blank range.
For long periods in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen JSOC opted for high mission rate based on bad intelligence over low mission rate and high quality results. They created whole new generations of Jihadi's as a result of that poor decision.
The "hiding behind women and children" is a silly propaganda line. You expect them to stand out in the middle of a field and put a bullseye on their chest so the drones can target them cleanly. They are facing an opponent with vast military superiority. They are going to blend in to villages and hide in mountains. Anything else would be shear stupidity and they aren't stupid.
There is another great story from Scahill's book that shows how flimsy and flawed the intelligence JSOC has been using to execute people is.
An informant apparently figured out he could finger just about anyone and JSOC would sweep in and kill them without even minimaly checking the intelligence. He told JSOC there were Al Qaeda or Taliban at a certain compound. In reality people there were a police commander and his family there. He wactually worked with the U.S. and was having a christening party with music(which should have been the first tip it wasn't Taliban or Al Qaeda since they shun music).
JSOC swept in, shooting first and not asking questions later. The police commander and another man were shot when they stepped out and tried to tell the people with night vision and lasers they were in the wrong place.
Three women then stepped out to try to help the two men and they were shot. About this time JSOC figured out they'd made a mistake. They dug their bullets out of the women with their knives while they were still alive. The official line from NATO for several days was the two dead men had stabbed the women as part of an honor killing and JSOC killed the men to protect the women. This lie quickly unraveled when journalists started investigating. Eventually the JSOC commander, McRaven, had to come to the family beg forgiveness, slaughter a sheep and buy them off with cash.
The basic point here is once you start extrajudicial killings based on often flawed intelligence, and you are accountable to no one, you can literally get away with murdering just about anyone, anywhere and there is next to nothing anyone can do about it. The main failure in this case is they failed to keep journalists away from the victims. They also probably should have used a drone strike since all they leave behind are small peices of meat so its often hard to tell what happened or even who was killed.
Your point is valid though the methodologies used in those wars were somewhat different. As best I remember they were mostly using locals being run by CIA and Green Berets which was the old school U.S. way to run dirty wars.
The organizational structure used after 9/11 was relatively new and conceived mostly by Rumsfeld and Cheney. It was based on new special force commands, namely JSOC and SOCOM, and were built around Delta and SEALS. They haven't used Green Berets as much because they usually work with indigenous forces.
JSOC has been largely indifferent to local forces, working on their own doing fairly indiscriminate find and fix ops without telling anyone what they are doing. They mostly bypassed the CIA to avoid congressional scrutiny and weren't reporting through the normal chain of command through the Joint Chiefs and regional commands so they've been largely operating without normal oversight from the Pentagon. They've been run almost entirely by the White House and Secretary of Defense without much scrutiny or oversight from anyone else.
There was a well known case of an innocent Canadian who was on a flight connecting through New York City who was seized at the airport and rendered to Syria where he was tortured. He was apparently targetted because he was mentioned as a refernce on an apartment application of someone under suspicion. No one really knows how many other people have been rendered out of the U.S., you only know if they are released at some point and speak out.
There have been well publicized cases in Italy and Germany. A number of CIA agents were tried and convicted in absentia by Italy for kidnapping because they rendered someone off the streets of Italy consulting the Italians.
There was a person rendered from Europe who had the same name as a suspected Islamist, but he was completely innocent and was completely disappeared for months, his family didn't know what happened to him, until the mistake was discovered months later and he was released.
One of the three U.S. citizens executed by drone was Anwar Awliki's son. There is no evidence he ever had anything to do with Al Qaede. He was 16 years old, though at the time he was killed the U.S. claimed he was 21. The U.S. claimed they were targeted someone else from Al Qaeda when they killed him but that person was no where near the drone stoke. The boy was at an outdoor barbecue with cousins when he and all the innocent people around him were killed by a drone strike. They were disappeared in a way, they were turned in to small peices of meat and bone and were buried in a communal grave because they couldn't be identified.
Early in the dirty war in Yeme the U.S. didn't have enough drones so they used cruise missiles from a submarine loaded with cluster bombs to level a village. There may have been one suspected Al Qaeda affiliate in the village, but thats not even certain, nearly everyone killed were innocent bystanders, many women and children.
The dirty wars are certainly killing a lot of Al Qaeda affiliates. They are almost certainly killing a larger number of innocent civilians which will fuel new generations to hate America.
How exactly have you gone ten years without hearing about rendition. The U.S. especially JSOC and SOCOM, have been snatching people all over the world since 9/11 and making them disappear. Many of them have been rendered based on the flimsiest of evidence or have even been totally the wrong people because of mistaken identity. These people have been disappeared in to secret U.S. prisons abroad and to states like Egypt for interrogation and torture where they have no access to the Red Cross, lawyers or family. They actually totally disappear. Try reading Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars.
There is also an issue with the U.S. using drones and cruise missiles over large swaths of the globe to conduct summary executions of individuals based on often flawed intelligence, and frequently killing large numbers of women and children in the process. At least three of the executions have been U.S. citizens, including a 16 year old boy.
Just because they are Muslim does that mean they don't count in your book?
Common characteristics of a police state, wide spread spying on citizens, warrantless arrest and detention, torture, rigged judicial system and trials, execution of citizens without due process, suppression of a free press, suppression of opposition parties, censorship, seizure of property, targeting of opposition groups and minorities, prevent freedom of movement.
You do realize the U.S. and U.K. have engaged in all of these. I can run through examples of each if that will help enlighten you. The U.S. and U.K are not particularly iron fist police states, they prefer more the velvet gloved fist. They aren't particularly wide spread or oppressive police states yet, just give them time and a few more excuses.
It is no secret the U.S. has tortured people on a wide scale and very recently. This precedent has been set and the people who did it got away with it. Obama has dialed it back some, preferring to let third parties do it so he can claim the U.S. isn't torturing but the U.S. is still actively participating in and bankrolling it.
Obama has executed at least three American's by drone, which is the new prefered means of execution. Thre is no judicial process or if there was it is secret. One the the people killed was a 16 year old boy who apparently was targetted because he was the son of someone the U.S. hated.
Obama has been he most aggressive adminstration in targetting journalists in recent history, especially ones who are telling stories the U.S. doesn't want told. Obama had a journalist in Yemen jailed for 3 years for exposing a cruise missile strike that killed civilians and interviewing Anwar Awliki.
Try bring any of the recent abuses of our Constituion to a court of law and most are shut down by State Secret privlideges. Many abuses of civil rights are currently untriable.
The U.S. pretends to have opposition parties but in fact the two parties we have are two sides of the same coin pursuing the same agenda on most issues that count, and only differing on wedge issues or where tax money is squandered. Third parties are ruthlessley suppressed, marginalized and muzzled in the U.S. especially ones which challenge the status quo.
The U.S. doesn't practice overt censorship, the U.K. is farther down this road. The U.S. favors more suble censorship and propaganda using a small number of corporate controlled media companies who do most of the shaping of public opinion. The U.S. prefers just listening to and recording what everyong is watching, reading, listening to and saying so they can spot the troublemakers.
The U.S. is actively planing for the near future when there will more terrorist attacks (i.e. 9/11), natural disasters(i.e. Katrina), protest movements (i.e. Occupy) and resource shortage shocks and when they occur they will ratchet up the police state a few more notches.
If you want an eye opener on the next generation global police state the U.S. has become grab a copy of Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars. U.S. special forces and intelligence are now roaming the globe engaging in largely unsupervised executions, renditions, torture and spying. This started under Bush/Cheney and Obama has actually dramatically accellerated and extended it. Some of their attacks have been very successful like killing Bin Laden, many of them are deeply flawed, killing large numbers of innocents, including women and children, and spawning new generations who hate America. The important part being they have almost no oversige from Congress or the judiciary, and often inadequate oversight from the White House and Pentagon who are running this global police apparatus.
The Tea Party is half of what the Republican party should be. If they'd stuck to fiscal conservatism and stayed focused on reigning in the out of control Federal government they would have been widely embraced by the American people and would be running the country by now.
Unfortunately they were infiltrated by a bunch of crazies pushing social conservatism with a dose of religious fanaticism and worse a bunch of political opportunists who've been milking and co-opting them for their own benefit. They should have shown Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Mike Huckabee and Glen Beck the door with extreme prejudice and haste.
At this point the Tea Party brand has been trashed by political opportunists whom are the people to whom the Tea Party should be diametrically opposed .
My deepest desire is for an party that is a cross between the Tea Party and Occupy. The two movements have a lot more in common than most people realize. This new party should be equally opposed to both out of control Federal government and rapacious banks, corporations and plutocrats at . It should be a party with a big and open tent that will stay completely out of social and religious issues and let people decide for themselves what their values are, which is why the founders separated church and state in the first palce. Meanwhile it should be bare knuckled brawling with the blood suckers who are really killing America.
This is a pretty flawed analogy when it comes to digitial information. There is nothing on a laptop or smartphone that can't be sent in and out of the U.S. on a digitial network and bypass border inspection entirely, especially if its encrypted.
If they want to do a physical inspection to insure there is no contraband in the device, preferably while the owner is watching, that's fine. Imaging the digital contents of the device, copying your contacts, email and phone history is pretty much invasion of privacy and targetted harassment.
There is also a high risk that while they have your devices they will install spying hardware or software so once you get your device back you can no longer trust it.
Many multinationals simply wont let travelers carry anything important across borders any more. Its safer to transfer it digitally over networks and have the traveler pick up their gear and data in country.
One thing I've realized of late is that everything the U.S. has been accusing China of doing, with self righteous indignation, the U.S. has been doing too, usually better and more zealously.
The U.S. and U.K. are pretty far down the road to becoming xenophobic, pariah states. Its an extremely unwise path to choose, especially if you want a healthy economy. Its reaching the point that anyone who has a choice will refrain from engaging with them in economic, academic and scientific endeavors. If you are well educated, skilled entrepenuer or acadamic you would have to be a little nuts to want to work or study in the U.S. or U.K. these days.
Its sad that the U.S. and U.K. have self inflicted more damage on themeselves and their citizens than terrorist attacks could ever have dreamed. That is the whole idea behind terrorism, the reaction and countermeasures are usually more damaging to the target than the actual attacks.
Civil servants are frequently working for the chance to retire after 30 years, with a life time pension, and the ability to start a new career in the private sector, often exploiting their government connections, and working for the contractors they once managed. This is often refered to as double dipping. If you do military, civil service and then private sector its triple dipping. There salaries may not be great but their life time payout is actually really good. Life time pensions are increasingly rare in the private sectors because they are staggeringly expensive with people increasingly living to be a 100.
If you actually compare private sector versus civil service salaries, civil service salaries are starting to outpace the private sector in many fields. This is partially a product of private sector salaries being stagnant in many fields for decades.
Certainly Wall Street banker and hedge fund manager out performs civil service. In the case of SEC civil servents they are usually there to do favors for the big banks and brokers they are supposed to be regulating and then they cash in the favors for high paying job with the people they used to regulate. There is a similar revolving door in just about every Federal agency. And yes it is also known as corruption.
OWS scared the crap out of DHS and just about every law enforcement agency at Federal, state and local levels where they were occurring. Thats why they so ruthlessly destroyed them, and DHS was coordinating the strategy for destroying them nation wide. If Occupy hadn't been crushed it would have become very dangerous to the entrenched, corrupt people who've stolen our country.
Its purely amazing that enough American's participated in Occupy to actually scare the police state that was built post 9/11. Just about everyone had written Americans off has hopelessly apathetic and too scared to do anything about anything, and Occupy disproved that. That is a seminal accomplishment.
The next crash, and another crash is inevitable since absolutely none of the factors that caused the last crash were fixed, in fact they've been massively amplified, there is a high probability American's will finally say enough is enough with the massive corruption that has engulfed Wall Street and Washington D.C.
When that time comes the occupy movement will be the framework for the next attempt to take our country back from the people who stole it from us.
Its not revolution to take your country back, its a patriotic restoration and an obligation. The Founding Fathers would be cheering it on.
Yea and they can brick those in approximately the same time it takes to acquire them. If law enforcement can do the bricking it saves tham having to rely on the phone company.
I'm talking here about a street demonstration which law enforcement wants to bring under control and which is being coordinated and filmed by people with phones. You brick all the phones in the problem area and you shut off most of their cameras and coordinatopm, they are put back in the stone age while the police are using every technology available.
Shutting off cells towers is substantially less effective than bricking all the phones because bricking kills the cameras and GPS too. Will also inflict immediate financial and organizational damage on all the protestors.
I think it was Turing who actually started it. Its been going on since at least World War II in electronic form. Only thing that has happened lately is the move from tapping copper undersea cables and RF to tapping fiber optics and routers. That and they have the compute power and storage capacity to do it to everyone instead of select targets.
What exactly is this Mozilla model that works so well? Besides charity from Google I mean. I wonder if Google keeps Firefox alive just to avoid antitrust issues with Chrome.
Those desolate islands, along with several other groups of islands, are part of a multi country conflict to try to gain control of the probably vast oil and gas fields under the South China Sea. Countries need the islands to lay claim to larger exclusive economic zone that extend up to 200 nautical miles off a county's coast.
My concern with the Gates Foundation, like most of their ilk, is the paradox of doing good. Do the people who want to eradicate poverty, feed the world and cure all diseases ever stop to think what the long term consequences will be if they actually succeed?
They are contributing to an eventual population crisis and a crash which will be ever more spectacular the longer we keep staving it off with tech.
There should be an iron clad linkage that if you are going to be a do gooder that you are also going to figure out a way to insure all the people you are saving are going to stop having babies. Improving education and economic well being may eventually lead to this result but its slow and not a certain outcome.
You simply can't keep delivering ship loads of food aid to cultures where couples insist on having 12 children whom they can't feed without ship loads of food aid.
Religions like Catholicism and Islam who compel their flock to breed like rabbits are also doing this planet no favors. Many developed countries are finally starting to get their demographics under control, Japan and Russia are apparently heading towards demographic crashes. Unfortunately Africa, India and various parts of Asia are still breeding too fast for a planet that is being stretched to its breaking point, they need to stop.
China'a one child policy, as ruthless as it is, is doing more good than anything the Gates foundation will ever do for the planet.
I know its all fashionable to beat on the man, but seriously.
There might be some companies where CEO's do nothing, and there is certainly a debate worth having on whether many CEO's are paid too much.
But, the CEO is the person who decides what products the company makes, is responsible for making sure those products are built on time, and sell when they hit the market. They are the people who ultimately insure the company makes its payroll so workers have jobs and get paid. If its a publicly traded company you can add on the massive burdens of answering to regulators, shareholders and the media.
Most CEO's I've seen work really hard, I doubt I'd want the job. They usually have to travel a lot, they have to sit an insufferable amount of meetings, they carry huge burdens on their shoulders most of the time.
You seriously need to spend a week BEING a CEO, so we can all see how horrible you would be at it, and then maybe you would stop running your mouth spewing nonsense.
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Scahill is a well known and respected journalist. His book has pictures of McRaven visiting the surviving family members and slaughtering a sheep to beg forgivness of the family. NATO and JSOC have fully admitted that it was a mistake, and that there was an attempt to cover it up. The fundemental problem they had covering it up was the targets were so amazingly, obviously wrong, a police chief and a prosecutor, there were so many witnesses who survived, journalist were on scene fairly quickly and the attempted cover up was so obvious it fell apart immediately.
It would lead you to beleive that there are probably a significant number of "accidents" where the victims are not well known, there are no surviving witnesses, journalists can't reach the scene, or the victims are all pulverized by explosives and unidentifiable so they JSOC can get away with one coverup after another.
You do realize the people operating those drones are hiding among civilians too don't you? They go home to the spouse and kids when they get off work. Would you be upset if someone lobbed a cruise missile full of cluster bombs in to those towns?
The father of the Chinese space program was one of the founders of JPL, Jet Propulsion == rockets. The U.S. government hounded him so much for being Chinese, and possibly a spy, he eventually returned home to China and built a space program there.
The rest of your thesis is deeply flawed and NOT insightful. The U.S. space program is alive and well at JPL, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital Sciences and a number of other private companies.
The only thing that went wrong was letting a series of U.S. Presidents, Congress and NASA completely screw it up for a few decades. Space programs need to be run by visionaries with a plan, laser focus, sufficient resources and the capacity to stick with it even when its hard, so they acheive their goals. Von Braun was the visionary who made Apollo happen. Musk is the most likely visionary to get the U.S. to Mars first.
The space program as run by the U.S. government and NASA is doomed, if for no other reason than they completely change the strategy every 4 to 8 years, and their strategic decisions are based on how many jobs will be created in the districts of powerful Congressmen, not sound or rational engineering or whether a project is worth doing. As a result NASA seldom ever finishes anything (outside of JPL and observatories).
NASA is also never held accountable for failure to finish anything, partially because politcians always cancel the programs half way through right before they actually have to build and do something. NASA's staff need to propose projects that are well engineered and worth doing, tell Congress to fund them at a sufficient and sustained level to finish them, and if Congress and President wont they need to threaten to mass resign. If NASA can't do programs like that they should all mass resign, shutter the failed parts of the organization and put the money directly in to places like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences.
So you are saying that if a friend of yours is a terrorist, unbeknownst to you, you are OK with the U.S. government executing you without a trial.
You may not know this but Bin Laden's father is an affluent, respected owner of a multi billion dollar Saudi construction company. As far we anyone knows he disowned his son and had no ties to terrorism. By your reasoning the U.S. should still execute him and all of his relatives?
You either have rule of law or you don't. Rule of law says you are accountable for your actions not the actions of people you happen to know or share a blood line with. Rule of law says you produce evidence of someone's wrong doing to a judge and jury and they decided if the evidence warrants punishment.
The key point is I'm NOT the one who took this thread off topic, you were doing it before I did so don't pin it on me.
I think I made it pretty clear that in at least one case the U.S. has someone disappear from the U.S. I've also made the probably even more disturbing point that he U.S. has managed to bestow on itself the power to not only make people disappear in the U.S. but anywhere on the planet, which is far more disturbing and surpasses the powers of any previous police state.
JSOC is operating in at least 100 countries and they are accountable to no one other than maybe the White House and the SecDef occasionally. They are operating as judge, jury, torturer and executioner. There are no checks or balances and they are FREQUENTLY either making serious mistakes or serious errors in judgement.
There is a big difference between collateral damage on a declared battlefield and indiscriminate killing of civilians where the whole world is a battlefield and innocent civilians have no where to hide.
I'll say again you should read Scahill's book. Awliki's story is far more complex than it appears or U.S. propaganda painted it. Awkliki was actually very moderate before 9/11. He supported George W in 2000 because he was socially conservative and liked the hard line Republican stance on gays and other social issues. He was also the goto Muslim for U.S. media after 9/11 because of his moderation and appeals for calm.
His story then gets very murky after 9/11. There is at least some evidence the U.S. tried to coerce in to being an informant. In particular they may have snared him in two staged prostitution stings to pressure and discredit him. They hounded him relentless post 9/11 and he was dismayed at the brutal treatement Muslim's were getting in the U.S. He tried to return to the U.S. and was held at the border and then was suddenly released by the FBI to enter the U.S. He apparently went directly to someone the FBI wanted him to help implicate and he didn't even know. He was probably be coerced in to being an informant. He then fled the U.S. to never return because he didn't want to be an informant. When he returned to his ancestral home in Yemen the hounding continued under U.S. direction, he was imprisoned by Yemen for a time, and his radicationlization accellerated.
He was most definitely very radical when he was finally executed, but there is at least a 50/50 chance he was radicalized only because of 10 years of hounding and pressure applied by the U.S.
Still the fact that you think its OK to execute children based on the actions of their parents show just how morally challenged you and the U.S. government have become.
If U.S. citizens are guilty of something, try them in absentia in a court of law, put your evidence on the table and if you can convince a judge and jury then you have justification to act.
If you let the executive branch act as judge, jury and executioner you are opening a Pandora's box that all Americans will live to regret.
You seem to miss the point. U.S. indiscriminant killing of civilians is insuring this will be a perpetual war, which I suspect is what a lot of malevolent people in and around Washington D.C. want. This forever war spanning the entire globe gives them a blank check to do just about anything, anywhere, anytime and justify it by saying its necessary to keep American's safe. If the screw up and kill the wrong people they just lie, cover it up, and move on to the next set of executions. They can also spend unlimited quantities of money. After the Soviet Union fell DOD and Intelligence needed a new enemy to justify their enormous budgets. Now that they have one they will milk it forever.
You can't win a guerrilla war by working off an org chart of your enemy commanders and killing large numbers of civilians as collateral damage as you go after them. The French tried exactly this strategy in Algeria for years. They did take out a lot of boxes on their org charts but the brutality that went with it insured there was always a fresh supply of people who hated the French with a passion and constantly replenished the boxes on the org chart.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with targetting Al Qaeda and Taliban but you need to A) make sure the intelligence and targetting are rock solid and B) do everything possible to limit collateral damage. For example you kill them in vehicles on an open road instead of leveling an entire village full of innocent people.
Or you send in special operators to snatch and identify them. Unfortunately after 10 years they've realized that secret prisons are really messy from a human rights perspective so they've decided to use summary executions instead which is why they killed an unarmed Bin Laden at point blank range.
For long periods in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen JSOC opted for high mission rate based on bad intelligence over low mission rate and high quality results. They created whole new generations of Jihadi's as a result of that poor decision.
The "hiding behind women and children" is a silly propaganda line. You expect them to stand out in the middle of a field and put a bullseye on their chest so the drones can target them cleanly. They are facing an opponent with vast military superiority. They are going to blend in to villages and hide in mountains. Anything else would be shear stupidity and they aren't stupid.
LOL, YOU are the one who went off topic with
"If people were being "disappeared" in the US I expect we would hear something about it."
I was just pointing out how naive or misleading your point was.
There is another great story from Scahill's book that shows how flimsy and flawed the intelligence JSOC has been using to execute people is.
An informant apparently figured out he could finger just about anyone and JSOC would sweep in and kill them without even minimaly checking the intelligence. He told JSOC there were Al Qaeda or Taliban at a certain compound. In reality people there were a police commander and his family there. He wactually worked with the U.S. and was having a christening party with music(which should have been the first tip it wasn't Taliban or Al Qaeda since they shun music).
JSOC swept in, shooting first and not asking questions later. The police commander and another man were shot when they stepped out and tried to tell the people with night vision and lasers they were in the wrong place.
Three women then stepped out to try to help the two men and they were shot. About this time JSOC figured out they'd made a mistake. They dug their bullets out of the women with their knives while they were still alive. The official line from NATO for several days was the two dead men had stabbed the women as part of an honor killing and JSOC killed the men to protect the women. This lie quickly unraveled when journalists started investigating. Eventually the JSOC commander, McRaven, had to come to the family beg forgiveness, slaughter a sheep and buy them off with cash.
The basic point here is once you start extrajudicial killings based on often flawed intelligence, and you are accountable to no one, you can literally get away with murdering just about anyone, anywhere and there is next to nothing anyone can do about it. The main failure in this case is they failed to keep journalists away from the victims. They also probably should have used a drone strike since all they leave behind are small peices of meat so its often hard to tell what happened or even who was killed.
Your point is valid though the methodologies used in those wars were somewhat different. As best I remember they were mostly using locals being run by CIA and Green Berets which was the old school U.S. way to run dirty wars.
The organizational structure used after 9/11 was relatively new and conceived mostly by Rumsfeld and Cheney. It was based on new special force commands, namely JSOC and SOCOM, and were built around Delta and SEALS. They haven't used Green Berets as much because they usually work with indigenous forces.
JSOC has been largely indifferent to local forces, working on their own doing fairly indiscriminate find and fix ops without telling anyone what they are doing. They mostly bypassed the CIA to avoid congressional scrutiny and weren't reporting through the normal chain of command through the Joint Chiefs and regional commands so they've been largely operating without normal oversight from the Pentagon. They've been run almost entirely by the White House and Secretary of Defense without much scrutiny or oversight from anyone else.
There was a well known case of an innocent Canadian who was on a flight connecting through New York City who was seized at the airport and rendered to Syria where he was tortured. He was apparently targetted because he was mentioned as a refernce on an apartment application of someone under suspicion. No one really knows how many other people have been rendered out of the U.S., you only know if they are released at some point and speak out.
There have been well publicized cases in Italy and Germany. A number of CIA agents were tried and convicted in absentia by Italy for kidnapping because they rendered someone off the streets of Italy consulting the Italians.
There was a person rendered from Europe who had the same name as a suspected Islamist, but he was completely innocent and was completely disappeared for months, his family didn't know what happened to him, until the mistake was discovered months later and he was released.
One of the three U.S. citizens executed by drone was Anwar Awliki's son. There is no evidence he ever had anything to do with Al Qaede. He was 16 years old, though at the time he was killed the U.S. claimed he was 21. The U.S. claimed they were targeted someone else from Al Qaeda when they killed him but that person was no where near the drone stoke. The boy was at an outdoor barbecue with cousins when he and all the innocent people around him were killed by a drone strike. They were disappeared in a way, they were turned in to small peices of meat and bone and were buried in a communal grave because they couldn't be identified.
Early in the dirty war in Yeme the U.S. didn't have enough drones so they used cruise missiles from a submarine loaded with cluster bombs to level a village. There may have been one suspected Al Qaeda affiliate in the village, but thats not even certain, nearly everyone killed were innocent bystanders, many women and children.
The dirty wars are certainly killing a lot of Al Qaeda affiliates. They are almost certainly killing a larger number of innocent civilians which will fuel new generations to hate America.
How exactly have you gone ten years without hearing about rendition. The U.S. especially JSOC and SOCOM, have been snatching people all over the world since 9/11 and making them disappear. Many of them have been rendered based on the flimsiest of evidence or have even been totally the wrong people because of mistaken identity. These people have been disappeared in to secret U.S. prisons abroad and to states like Egypt for interrogation and torture where they have no access to the Red Cross, lawyers or family. They actually totally disappear. Try reading Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars.
There is also an issue with the U.S. using drones and cruise missiles over large swaths of the globe to conduct summary executions of individuals based on often flawed intelligence, and frequently killing large numbers of women and children in the process. At least three of the executions have been U.S. citizens, including a 16 year old boy.
Just because they are Muslim does that mean they don't count in your book?
You seem to be a little naive my friend.
Common characteristics of a police state, wide spread spying on citizens, warrantless arrest and detention, torture, rigged judicial system and trials, execution of citizens without due process, suppression of a free press, suppression of opposition parties, censorship, seizure of property, targeting of opposition groups and minorities, prevent freedom of movement.
You do realize the U.S. and U.K. have engaged in all of these. I can run through examples of each if that will help enlighten you. The U.S. and U.K are not particularly iron fist police states, they prefer more the velvet gloved fist. They aren't particularly wide spread or oppressive police states yet, just give them time and a few more excuses.
It is no secret the U.S. has tortured people on a wide scale and very recently. This precedent has been set and the people who did it got away with it. Obama has dialed it back some, preferring to let third parties do it so he can claim the U.S. isn't torturing but the U.S. is still actively participating in and bankrolling it.
Obama has executed at least three American's by drone, which is the new prefered means of execution. Thre is no judicial process or if there was it is secret. One the the people killed was a 16 year old boy who apparently was targetted because he was the son of someone the U.S. hated.
Obama has been he most aggressive adminstration in targetting journalists in recent history, especially ones who are telling stories the U.S. doesn't want told. Obama had a journalist in Yemen jailed for 3 years for exposing a cruise missile strike that killed civilians and interviewing Anwar Awliki.
Try bring any of the recent abuses of our Constituion to a court of law and most are shut down by State Secret privlideges. Many abuses of civil rights are currently untriable.
The U.S. pretends to have opposition parties but in fact the two parties we have are two sides of the same coin pursuing the same agenda on most issues that count, and only differing on wedge issues or where tax money is squandered. Third parties are ruthlessley suppressed, marginalized and muzzled in the U.S. especially ones which challenge the status quo.
The U.S. doesn't practice overt censorship, the U.K. is farther down this road. The U.S. favors more suble censorship and propaganda using a small number of corporate controlled media companies who do most of the shaping of public opinion. The U.S. prefers just listening to and recording what everyong is watching, reading, listening to and saying so they can spot the troublemakers.
The U.S. is actively planing for the near future when there will more terrorist attacks (i.e. 9/11), natural disasters(i.e. Katrina), protest movements (i.e. Occupy) and resource shortage shocks and when they occur they will ratchet up the police state a few more notches.
If you want an eye opener on the next generation global police state the U.S. has become grab a copy of Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars. U.S. special forces and intelligence are now roaming the globe engaging in largely unsupervised executions, renditions, torture and spying. This started under Bush/Cheney and Obama has actually dramatically accellerated and extended it. Some of their attacks have been very successful like killing Bin Laden, many of them are deeply flawed, killing large numbers of innocents, including women and children, and spawning new generations who hate America. The important part being they have almost no oversige from Congress or the judiciary, and often inadequate oversight from the White House and Pentagon who are running this global police apparatus.
The Tea Party is half of what the Republican party should be. If they'd stuck to fiscal conservatism and stayed focused on reigning in the out of control Federal government they would have been widely embraced by the American people and would be running the country by now.
Unfortunately they were infiltrated by a bunch of crazies pushing social conservatism with a dose of religious fanaticism and worse a bunch of political opportunists who've been milking and co-opting them for their own benefit. They should have shown Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Mike Huckabee and Glen Beck the door with extreme prejudice and haste.
At this point the Tea Party brand has been trashed by political opportunists whom are the people to whom the Tea Party should be diametrically opposed .
My deepest desire is for an party that is a cross between the Tea Party and Occupy. The two movements have a lot more in common than most people realize. This new party should be equally opposed to both out of control Federal government and rapacious banks, corporations and plutocrats at . It should be a party with a big and open tent that will stay completely out of social and religious issues and let people decide for themselves what their values are, which is why the founders separated church and state in the first palce. Meanwhile it should be bare knuckled brawling with the blood suckers who are really killing America.
This is a pretty flawed analogy when it comes to digitial information. There is nothing on a laptop or smartphone that can't be sent in and out of the U.S. on a digitial network and bypass border inspection entirely, especially if its encrypted.
If they want to do a physical inspection to insure there is no contraband in the device, preferably while the owner is watching, that's fine. Imaging the digital contents of the device, copying your contacts, email and phone history is pretty much invasion of privacy and targetted harassment.
There is also a high risk that while they have your devices they will install spying hardware or software so once you get your device back you can no longer trust it.
Many multinationals simply wont let travelers carry anything important across borders any more. Its safer to transfer it digitally over networks and have the traveler pick up their gear and data in country.
One thing I've realized of late is that everything the U.S. has been accusing China of doing, with self righteous indignation, the U.S. has been doing too, usually better and more zealously.
The U.S. and U.K. are pretty far down the road to becoming xenophobic, pariah states. Its an extremely unwise path to choose, especially if you want a healthy economy. Its reaching the point that anyone who has a choice will refrain from engaging with them in economic, academic and scientific endeavors. If you are well educated, skilled entrepenuer or acadamic you would have to be a little nuts to want to work or study in the U.S. or U.K. these days.
Its sad that the U.S. and U.K. have self inflicted more damage on themeselves and their citizens than terrorist attacks could ever have dreamed. That is the whole idea behind terrorism, the reaction and countermeasures are usually more damaging to the target than the actual attacks.
And what about the applications the undercover NSA employees take? They are quite active in the open source community.
Civil servants are frequently working for the chance to retire after 30 years, with a life time pension, and the ability to start a new career in the private sector, often exploiting their government connections, and working for the contractors they once managed. This is often refered to as double dipping. If you do military, civil service and then private sector its triple dipping. There salaries may not be great but their life time payout is actually really good. Life time pensions are increasingly rare in the private sectors because they are staggeringly expensive with people increasingly living to be a 100.
If you actually compare private sector versus civil service salaries, civil service salaries are starting to outpace the private sector in many fields. This is partially a product of private sector salaries being stagnant in many fields for decades.
Certainly Wall Street banker and hedge fund manager out performs civil service. In the case of SEC civil servents they are usually there to do favors for the big banks and brokers they are supposed to be regulating and then they cash in the favors for high paying job with the people they used to regulate. There is a similar revolving door in just about every Federal agency. And yes it is also known as corruption.
OWS scared the crap out of DHS and just about every law enforcement agency at Federal, state and local levels where they were occurring. Thats why they so ruthlessly destroyed them, and DHS was coordinating the strategy for destroying them nation wide. If Occupy hadn't been crushed it would have become very dangerous to the entrenched, corrupt people who've stolen our country.
Its purely amazing that enough American's participated in Occupy to actually scare the police state that was built post 9/11. Just about everyone had written Americans off has hopelessly apathetic and too scared to do anything about anything, and Occupy disproved that. That is a seminal accomplishment.
The next crash, and another crash is inevitable since absolutely none of the factors that caused the last crash were fixed, in fact they've been massively amplified, there is a high probability American's will finally say enough is enough with the massive corruption that has engulfed Wall Street and Washington D.C.
When that time comes the occupy movement will be the framework for the next attempt to take our country back from the people who stole it from us.
Its not revolution to take your country back, its a patriotic restoration and an obligation. The Founding Fathers would be cheering it on.
Yea and they can brick those in approximately the same time it takes to acquire them. If law enforcement can do the bricking it saves tham having to rely on the phone company.
I'm talking here about a street demonstration which law enforcement wants to bring under control and which is being coordinated and filmed by people with phones. You brick all the phones in the problem area and you shut off most of their cameras and coordinatopm, they are put back in the stone age while the police are using every technology available.
Shutting off cells towers is substantially less effective than bricking all the phones because bricking kills the cameras and GPS too. Will also inflict immediate financial and organizational damage on all the protestors.
Very uaseful for law enforcement to kill the smartphones of anyone they consider problematic, like leaders of streets protests or occupy movements.
I think it was Turing who actually started it. Its been going on since at least World War II in electronic form. Only thing that has happened lately is the move from tapping copper undersea cables and RF to tapping fiber optics and routers. That and they have the compute power and storage capacity to do it to everyone instead of select targets.
What exactly is this Mozilla model that works so well? Besides charity from Google I mean. I wonder if Google keeps Firefox alive just to avoid antitrust issues with Chrome.
Those desolate islands, along with several other groups of islands, are part of a multi country conflict to try to gain control of the probably vast oil and gas fields under the South China Sea. Countries need the islands to lay claim to larger exclusive economic zone that extend up to 200 nautical miles off a county's coast.
My concern with the Gates Foundation, like most of their ilk, is the paradox of doing good. Do the people who want to eradicate poverty, feed the world and cure all diseases ever stop to think what the long term consequences will be if they actually succeed?
They are contributing to an eventual population crisis and a crash which will be ever more spectacular the longer we keep staving it off with tech.
There should be an iron clad linkage that if you are going to be a do gooder that you are also going to figure out a way to insure all the people you are saving are going to stop having babies. Improving education and economic well being may eventually lead to this result but its slow and not a certain outcome.
You simply can't keep delivering ship loads of food aid to cultures where couples insist on having 12 children whom they can't feed without ship loads of food aid.
Religions like Catholicism and Islam who compel their flock to breed like rabbits are also doing this planet no favors. Many developed countries are finally starting to get their demographics under control, Japan and Russia are apparently heading towards demographic crashes. Unfortunately Africa, India and various parts of Asia are still breeding too fast for a planet that is being stretched to its breaking point, they need to stop.
China'a one child policy, as ruthless as it is, is doing more good than anything the Gates foundation will ever do for the planet.
I know its all fashionable to beat on the man, but seriously.
There might be some companies where CEO's do nothing, and there is certainly a debate worth having on whether many CEO's are paid too much.
But, the CEO is the person who decides what products the company makes, is responsible for making sure those products are built on time, and sell when they hit the market. They are the people who ultimately insure the company makes its payroll so workers have jobs and get paid. If its a publicly traded company you can add on the massive burdens of answering to regulators, shareholders and the media.
Most CEO's I've seen work really hard, I doubt I'd want the job. They usually have to travel a lot, they have to sit an insufferable amount of meetings, they carry huge burdens on their shoulders most of the time.
You seriously need to spend a week BEING a CEO, so we can all see how horrible you would be at it, and then maybe you would stop running your mouth spewing nonsense.