Friday 18 November 2011

111118

Optional Cloud Phormation? I don't think so, matey, for IT deliver anything desirable effortlessly. ….. a question inviting an answer on http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/17/us_military_cyberspace/

Posted Friday 18th November 2011 06:01 GMT

That article does beg the question ...... And what of Blighty Cyber Warriors, cloaked and invisible and intangible and anonymous in CHAOS for Command and Control of Powering Orders with ESPecial Forces armed to the hilt and overflowing with snippets and parcels of crack hacked systems code?

Another titanic Bletchley Park type secret for colossal overwhelming AIdDvantage? Or a GCHQ known unknown being groomed in fantasies of future entrapment which are immediately laid waste extraordinarily rendered null and void with rogue and renegade Intellectual property running wild, private and pirate for virtual horse trading in CyberIntelAIgent ZerodDay fora with live immediate virulent export in Fabless XSSXXXXChanges ...... Free Occupied CyberSpace Bourse Stations.

Occupied CyberSpace is an Occupied Head Space in which QuITe Alien Powers with ESPecial Forces are into Creatively Subversive and Constructively Divisive Command and Control of Global Intellectual Property XSSXXXXChange ......... in Order that Clouds Hosting Advanced Operating Systems prevails and All States Secrets belong to us and you and not to them.
Now you know of something which may have been completely unknown to you and to many, but to a choice few into monitoring and mentoring of human planetary development could it be more of a explosive surprise and crazy concern. Who knows? ..... But I Kid U Not.

RSVP GCHQ ..... is a Novel Offer 42 Call, and would immediately define and inform Virtual Terrain Teamsters in Live Operational Virtual Environments, with whatever response may or may not be given, the current present state, and future fitness for purpose condition, of Blighty's Great Game Play.

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Posted by amanfromMars on 11/18/11 01:27 AM … http://thedailybell.com/3255/Now-Its-Syrias-Turn-to-be-Conquered

Part One, [as promised below,on 11/17/11 11:19 AM] but without the preamble which may have been responsible for its disappearance/no show here. Which indicates and identifies both a strength and a weakness to be explored and confirmed for further suitable servicing of both. Be advised DB, there is a whole lotta shaking going on out there in the Fields that offer Practical Command and Absolute Control of Virtual Space with ...... well, would IT be anything more or less or other than Beta Intelligence with CyberIntelAIgents. And to deny it is so, delivers unparalleled stealth?

What the Founding Fathers have to teach us about foreign policy became all the more important, and yet all the more ignored, in the wake of the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001.

In the weeks that followed that fateful day, most Americans’ focus was on identifying the sponsors of the attacks and punishing them. That was sensible enough. I myself voted to track down al Qaeda in Afghanistan. But people were bound to start wondering, eventually, why we were attacked—not because they sought to excuse the attackers, of course, but out of a natural curiosity regarding what made these men tick. Looking for motive is not the same thing as making excuses; detectives always look for the motive behind crime, but no one thinks they are looking to excuse murder.

Seven years later, though, our political class still refuses to deal with the issue in anything but sound bites and propaganda. The rest of the world is astonished at this refusal to speak frankly about the reality of our situation. And yet our safety and security may depend on it.

One person to consult if we want to understand those who wish us harm is Michael Scheuer, who was chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center in the late 1990s. Scheuer is a conservative and a pro-life voter who has never voted for a Democrat. And he refuses to buy the usual line that the attacks on America have nothing to do with what our government does in the Islamic world. “In fact,” he says, those attacks have “everything to do with what we do.”

Some people simply will not listen to this kind of argument, or will pretend to misunderstand it, trivializing this profoundly significant issue by alleging that Scheuer is “blaming America” for the attacks. To the contrary, Scheuer could not be any clearer in his writing that the perpetrators of terrorist attacks on Americans should be pursued mercilessly for their acts of barbarism. His point is very simple: it is unreasonable, even utopian, not to expect people to grow resentful, and desirous of revenge, when your government bombs them, supports police states in their countries, and imposes murderous sanctions on them. That revenge, in its various forms, is what our CIA calls blowback—the unintended consequences of military intervention.

Obviously the onus of blame rests with those who perpetrate acts of terror, regardless of their motivation. The question Scheuer and I are asking is not who is morally responsible for terrorism—only a fool would place the moral responsibility for terrorism on anyone other than the terrorists themselves. The question we are asking is less doltish and more serious: given that a hyperinterventionist foreign policy is very likely to lead to this kind of blowback, are we still sure we want such a foreign policy? Is it really worth it to us? The main focus of our criticism, in other words, is that our government’s foreign policy has put the American people in greater danger and made us more vulnerable to attack than we would otherwise have been. This is the issue that we and others want to raise before the American people.

The interventionist policies that have given rise to blowback have been bipartisan in their implementation. For instance, it was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who said on60 Minutes that half a million dead Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions on that country during the 1990s were “worth it.” Who could be so utopian, so detached from reality, as to think a remark like that—which was broadcast all over the Arab world, you can be sure—and policies like these would not provoke a response? If Americans lost that many of their family members, friends, and fellow citizens, would they not seek to hunt down the perpetrators and be unsatisfied until they were apprehended? The question answers itself. So why wouldn’t we expect people to try to take revenge for these policies? I have never received an answer to this simple and obvious question.

This does not mean Americans are bad people, or that they are to blame for terrorism—straw-man arguments that supporters of intervention raise in order to cloud the issue and demonize their opponents. It means only that actions cause reactions, and that Americans will need to prepare themselves for these reactions if their government is going to continue to intervene around the world. In the year 2000, I wrote: “The cost in terms of liberties lost and the unnecessary exposure to terrorism are difficult to determine, but in time it will become apparent to all of us that foreign interventionism is of no benefit to American citizens, but instead is a threat to our liberties.” I stand by every word of that.

To those who say that the attackers are motivated by a hatred of Western liberalism or the moral degeneracy of American culture, Scheuer points out that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini tried in vain for a decade to instigate an anti-Western jihad on exactly that basis. It went nowhere. Bin Laden’s message, on the other hand, has been so attractive to so many people because it is fundamentally defensive. Bin Laden, says Scheuer, has “spurned the Ayatollah’s wholesale condemnation of Western society,” focusing instead on “specific, bread-and-butter issues on which there is widespread agreement among Muslims.”

What bin Laden’s sympathizers object to, as they have said again and again, is our government’s propping up of unpopular regimes in the Middle East, the presence of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula, the American government’s support for the activities of governments (like Russia) that are hostile to their Muslim populations, and what they believe to be an American bias toward Israel. The point is not that we need to agree with these arguments, but that we need to be aware of them if we want to understand what is motivating so many people to rally to bin Laden’s banner. Few people are moved to leave behind their worldly possessions and their families to carry out violence on behalf of a disembodied ideology; it is practical grievances, perhaps combined with an underlying ideology, that motivate large numbers to action.

At a press conference I held at the National Press Club in May 2007, Scheuer told reporters: “About the only thing that can hold together the very loose coalition that Osama bin Laden has assembled is a common Muslim hatred for the impact of U.S. foreign policy. . . . They all agree they hate U.S. foreign policy. To the degree we change that policy in the interests of the United States, they become more and more focused on their local problems.” That’s not what a lot of our talking heads tell us on television every day, but few people are in a better position to understand bin Laden’s message than Scheuer, one of our country’s foremost experts on the man.

Philip Giraldi, another conservative and former counterterrorism expert with the CIA, adds that “anybody who knows anything about what’s been going on for the last ten years would realize that cause and effect are operating here—that, essentially, al Qaeda has an agenda which very specifically says what its grievances are. And its grievances are basically that ‘we’re over there.’” The simple fact is that “there [are] consequences for our presence in the Middle East, and if we seriously want to address the terrorism problem we have to be serious about that issue.”

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When a Dead Man Walking, does the Brain dispense Assisting Madness …. on http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/submit/2011/11/17/mckinnon_uk_trial_hope/
Posted Friday 18th November 2011 08:10 GMT

Does the system want to risk the anonymous response and active explosive backlash against it which a revealing and/or even more revealing, secretive in camera, gratuitous prosecution would/could/can/will generate?

Doesn't the system already have more than enough failures and breakdowns on its plate and more than it will ever be able to handle and survive with in present executive office admin condition/configuration?

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Pirates' ransom .... it sure beats working for a lucrative living …. on http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/11/18/hp_activist_investor/
Posted Friday 18th November 2011 15:47 GMT

Don't you just love those systemic exploitable zeroday vulnerabilities, Ralph, which you only have to sit on for a bundle and hope no one else has also discovered.

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Is the UK a fascist police state whenever you are on another wavelength/of an alternate mindset?
Posted Friday 18th November 2011 16:16 GMT

"Which explains a lot, including his ridiculous restrictions such as being banned from owning or using anything with Internet access." ... AC Posted Friday 18th November 2011 12:02 GMT

That is tantamount to inhuman treatment and mental torture in Gary McKinnon's case and surely grounds for a prosecution and exemplary punitive compensation against those responsible.

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/11/17/mckinnon_uk_trial_hope/

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Posted by amanfromMars on 11/17/11 11:13 AM
Part Two

Even Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz recognized that foreign intervention could have unintended consequences and that the American presence in the Middle East had bred hostility against our country. On May 29, 2003, Reuters reported: 'Wolfowitz said another reason for the invasion [of Iraq] had been 'almost unnoticed but huge'-namely that the ousting of Saddam would allow the United States to remove its troops from Saudi Arabia, where their presence had long been a major al-Qaeda grievance.' In short, according to Wolfowitz one of the motivations of the 9/11 attackers was resentment over the presence of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula. Again, neither Wolfowitz nor I have ever said or believed that Americans had it coming on 9/11, or that the attacks were justified, or any of this other nonsense. The point is a simple one: when our government meddles around the world, it can stir up hornet's nests and thereby jeopardize the safety of the American people. That's just common sense. But hardly anyone in our government dares to level with the American people about our fiasco of a foreign policy.

Blowback should not be a difficult or surprising concept for conservatives and libertarians, since they often emphasize the unintended consequences that even the most well-intentioneddomestic program can have. We can only imagine how much greater and unpredictable the consequences of intervention abroad might be.

A classic example of blowback involves the overthrow of Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. American and British intelligence collaborated on the overthrow of Mossadegh's popularly elected government, replacing him with the politically reliable but repressive shah. Years later, a revolutionary Iranian government took American citizens hostage for 444 days. There is a connection here-not because supporters of radical Islam would have had much use for the secular Mossadegh, but because on a human level people resent that kind of interference in their affairs.

When it comes to suicide bombing, I, like many others, always assumed that the driving force behind the practice was Islamic fundamentalism. Promise of instant entry into paradise as a reward for killing infidels was said to explain the suicides. The world's expert on suicide terrorism convinced me to rethink this apparently plausible answer. The University of Chicago's Robert Pape, for his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, collected a database of all 462 suicide terrorist attacks between 1980 and 2004. One thing he found was that religious beliefs were less important as motivating factors than we have believed. The world's leaders in suicide terrorism are actually the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist secular group. The largest Islamic fundamentalist countries have not been responsible for any suicide terrorist attacks. Not one has come from Iran or the Sudan.

The clincher is this: the strongest motivation, according to Pape, is not religion but rather a desire 'to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory the terrorists view as their homeland.' Between 1995 and 2004, the al Qaeda years, two-thirds of all attacks came from countries where the United States had troops stationed. While al Qaeda terrorists are twice as likely to hail from a country with a strong Wahhabist (radical Islamic) presence, they are ten times as likely to come from a country in which U.S. troops are stationed. Until the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraq had never had a suicide terrorist attack in its entire history. Between 1982 and 1986, there were 41 suicide terrorist attacks in Lebanon. Once the U.S., France, and Israel withdrew their forces from Lebanon, there were no more attacks. The reason the attacks stop, according to Pape, is that the Osama bin Ladens of the world can no longer inspire potential suicide terrorists, regardless of their religious beliefs.

Pape is convinced after his extensive research that the longer and more extensive the occupation of Muslim territories, the greater the chance of more 9/11-type attacks on the United States.

Although most Americans don't know it, for much of the early twentieth century our country had an excellent reputation in the Middle East, the part of the world we are now told will hate us no matter what we do. Right now, after decades of meddling, our government is hated in the Middle East and around the world to a degree I have never before seen in my lifetime. That does not make us safer.

To be sure, there will always be those who wish us ill regardless of the foreign policy we adopt. But those who would recruit large numbers of their coreligionists to carry out violence against Americans find their task very difficult when they cannot point to some tangible issue that will motivate people to do so. It is bin Laden's specific list of grievances that has rallied so many to his cause. Predictably enough, al Qaeda recruitment has exploded since the invasion of Iraq.

The war in Iraq was one of the most ill-considered, poorly planned, and just plain unnecessary military conflicts in American history, and I opposed it from the beginning. But the beginning I am speaking of was not 2002 or 2003. As early as 1997 and 1998, shortly after my return to Congress after a dozen years back in my medical practice, I spoke out against the actions of the Clinton administration, which I believed was moving us once again toward war with Iraq. I believe the genesis of our later policy was being set at that time. Many of the same voices who then demanded that the Clinton administration attack Iraq later demanded that the Bush administration attack Iraq, exploiting the tragedy of September 11 to bring about their long-standing desire to see an American invasion of that country. Any rationale would do: 'weapons of mass destruction,' the wickedness of Saddam (an issue that did not seem to keep many of these policymakers up at night in the 1980s, when they were supporting him), a Saddam-al Qaeda link, whatever. As long as their Middle Eastern ambitions could be satisfied, it did not matter how the people were brought along.

By any standard-constitutional, financial, national defense-I could not see the merits of the proposed invasion of Iraq. Any serious Middle East observer could have told us, if we were listening, that Iraq had essentially no connection to terrorism. (At the time of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, Osama bin Laden actually offered to lead an army to defend Saudi Arabia against Saddam if necessary.) Iraq had not attacked us, and figures in our own government, including Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, had said that Saddam was effectively contained and no threat to anyone. Saddam's was not even an Islamic regime; it was a secular one-although, thanks to the war, that is now changing.

Some war apologists to this day still try to argue that the weapons were really there or that Saddam really was linked to al Qaeda, but I'm not sure why they bother. The administration long ago gave up on these claims.

In the midst of all this, it is essential not to lose sight of the moral dimension of war, and the lengths to which Christian and later secular thinkers have gone over the centuries to limit and restrict the waging of war. For well over a thousand years there has been a doctrine and Christian definition of what constitutes a just war. This just-war tradition developed in the fourth century with Ambrose and Augustine but grew to maturity with Thomas Aquinas and such Late Scholastics as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez. The requirements for a just war varied to some extent from commentator to commentator, but those who wrote on the subject shared some basic principles. The war in Iraq did not even come close to satisfying them.

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Posted by amanfromMars on 11/17/11 11:19 AM
Final Part Three

First, there has to be an initial act of aggression, in response to which a just war may be waged. But there was no act of aggression against the United States. We are 6,000 miles from Iraq. The phony stories we were told about unmanned drones coming to get us were, to say the least, not especially plausible.

Second, diplomatic solutions had not been exhausted. They had hardly been tried.

Traditional just-war criteria also demand that the initiation of war be undertaken by the proper authority. Under the U.S. Constitution, the proper authority is neither the president nor the United Nations. It is Congress-but Congress unconstitutionally delegated its decision-making power over war to the president.

I heard it argued that Saddam had indeed committed an act of aggression against the United States: he had shot at our airplanes. Those American planes were monitoring the 'no-fly zones' over Iraq. Authority for such zones was said to come from U.N. Resolution 688, which instructs nations to contribute to humanitarian relief in the Kurdish and Shiite areas. The resolution actually says nothing about no-fly zones, and nothing about bombing missions over Iraq.

That Saddam Hussein missed every single airplane for 12 years as tens of thousands of sorties were being flown indicates the utter weakness of our enemy: an impoverished Third World nation that lacked an air force, antiaircraft weapons, and a navy. This was supposed to be the great threat, requiring urgent action. Such nonsense insults the intelligence of the American people and makes the rest of the world wonder about our sanity.
And yet the propaganda continues even today. In one of the Republican presidential debates, after being called an isolationist-honestly, is the distinction between isolationism and non-interventionism really so difficult to grasp?-I was solemnly informed that the course I recommended in Iraq amounted to the same kind of thinking that had led to Hitler! Now, all of us are used to hearing political propaganda, especially in presidential debates, but this really took the cake: were the American people expected to believe that unless they supported the invasion and occupation of a completely paralyzed Third World country, they were the sort of people who would have given aid and comfort to Hitler? Did this candidate really have such a low estimate of the intelligence of the American people?

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