An anonymous-style news blog covering government surveillance, terrorism, war, and civil liberties, with a critical view of US policy.
HN links it for its NSA spying coverage. Commenters cite it as a sourced read, while others debate the wider claims about Western foreign policy.
Obviously his comment was not very well thought out or supported by much of anything, and so warranted criticism, but lets not be blind to the substance behind his sentiment.
The IRA and UVF, Hezbollah etc all have something in common. That is that they are responses to actions primarily done by imperialistic actions of other countries (the UVF was the counter to the IRA which was a response to British actions, while Hezbollah was largely a response to Israel's invasion of Beruit in 82 and America's support afterwards).
ISIS was largely trained in Jordan and sent into Syria to topple Assad by the US, (despite the fact this has been covered up really well), and when they failed they shifted into Iraq and are performing the great task of keeping Iraq in a state of chaos.
So first of all, lets stop pretending like the IRA, UVF, Hezbollah, or ISIS can be summarized so simply.
That's not to justify them or whitewash their actions either though, I was shocked when I learned that the total deaths in the UVF/IRA conflict (which the Brits characteristically love to downplay by calling it "The Troubles") were close to 6,000 and that total casualties were close to 50,000. Those are number comparable to the first years of the US invasion of Iraq.
So you're right that having naive ideas about community with such entities are dangerous, the real issue is that it is often the actions of the Imperialistic countries such as the US and UK that have caused many of these organizations to…
How easy it is to change the policy adopted and executed for over 5 decades [0]. During this period both of the parties have sufficiently ruled Washington with same policy.
Glenn Greenwald provides further documentation that the various Middle Eastern and North African wars were planned before 9/11 [1]
"General Wesley Clark … said the aim of this plot [to “destroy the governments in … Iraq, … Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran”] was this: “They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.” He then recounted a conversation he had had ten years earlier with Paul Wolfowitz — back in 1991 — in which the then-number-3-Pentagon-official, after criticizing Bush 41 for not toppling Saddam, told Clark: “But one thing we did learn [from the Persian Gulf War] is that we can use our military in the region – in the Middle East – and the Soviets won’t stop us. And we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran [sic], Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us.” Clark said he was shocked by Wolfowitz’s desires because, as Clark put it: “the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments? It’s not to deter conflicts?”
[I]n the aftermath of military-caused regime change in Iraq and Libya … with concerted regime change efforts now underway aimed at Syria and Iran, with active and escalating proxy fighting in Somalia, with a modest military deployment to South…
While I do think human rights are a good idea, the focus seems to be carefully selected to as to make "bad" countries look bad and western countries look good. For the US, it's OK to kill people as long as you do it a bit randomly in a war instead of being too targeted, or as long as you do it to foreigners not your own citizens and you try to kill them quickly instead of using deliberate torture. If you do use torture, it should be psychological (solitary confinement) rather than physical. It's also OK to kill people by leaving them in an unsafe environment surrounded by killers (poor neighborhoods) without providing enough security or enough income to buy their way out. It's also OK to kill them in the name of economic progress by allowing cars to drive at speeds which regularly cause death. Somehow we accept these things as tolerable or even necessary but we don't realize that classic "bad country tortures dissidents" human rights abuses are equally necessary - they do the same thing wars do - secure the positions of governments against people who want to take them over. Even the name "dissident" is misleading - If we called Falun Gong members "traitors", that might make them sound like bad people and engender less public sympathy.
Cartoon about our patriotic biases: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/03/glorious-leader-wicked-despot.html
That said, it doesn't stop human rights abuses being wrong too.
> However, there are good things going on in Saudi Arabia right now...
What is not given prominent coverage at the moment is MbS is the latest in the House of Saud attempting to prune back the Wahhabist power base [1]. There are whispers that Jamal Kashoggi might possibly be nefariously related to 9/11, and is at the least a "person of interest" [2]. It is extremely unlikely we will ever know the realpolitik behind-the-scenes story now, and going back to status quo ante becomes increasingly possible for the KSA the more days this drags on (it would be interesting to find out if the KSA has procured crisis management and/or PR expertise for this incident).
[1] https://www.albawaba.com/news/saudi-arabia-turning-against-wahhabism-1114788
[2] https://washingtonsblog.com/2018/10/jamal-khashoggi-where-the-road-to-damascus-the-path-to-9-11-converge.html
I think that at this point FB has proven that people will be nasty regardless of how not-anonymous they are.
As such I'm doubtful this will change anything about peoples behavior.
It's also quite scary how nonchalant many people here are arguing for this to stop "propaganda" which these days seems to be as easily defined as "Anything that doesn't conform with a Western/US-centric narrative".
Because I have yet to see one of these "propaganda ban waves" be reasoned with anything but "Russia/Iranian/Chinese propaganda" like that's the only kind of "propaganda" that exists [0].
As such I consider these "propaganda bans" just another exercise in propaganda [1].
[0] https://washingtonsblog.com/2014/07/pentagon-admits-spending-millions-study-manipulate-social-media-users.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsehood_in_War-Time#Summary
>One of the major points made in the article is that nobody hears about the attacks that get prevented.
The government would be shouting from the rooftops if they've prevented any attacks, if only to justify the surveillance. Pre-2015 there was a report that mass surveillance had not prevented a single attack. I'm not sure if that statistic is still true, but I imagine it is.
It does them no favors to keep the attacks prevented hush-hush, as it leads citizens to believe it isn't working at all.
Former NSA analyst, head of the spying program, calls it useless. [0] And more information/people-in-the-know [1].
[0] http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/10/what-do-they-know-about-you-an-interview-with-nsa-analyst-william-binney/3/
[1] http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/07/the-fact-that-mass-surveillance-doesnt-keep-us-safe-goes-mainstream.html