US State Department Hacks Al-Qaeda Websites In Yemen 245
shuttah writes "In the growing Al-Qaeda activity in Yemen, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed today that 'cyber experts' had recently hacked into web sites being used by an Al-Qaeda affiliate, substituting the group's anti-American rhetoric with information about civilians killed in terrorist strikes. Also this week, a statement from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs revealed the presence an Al-Qaeda video calling for 'Electronic Jihad.'"
Re:...Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
They didn't 'hack' a website. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:...Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Yup. Underscoring this.... I was listening to Hillary and Panetta yesterday talking about this Doctor in Pakistan. The guy has been arrested for "Working for a foriegn intelligence agency". A crime which could get you life in prison or even death if you were caught doing it here.
They, of course, want their informant released. Never mind that he broke the trust of Doctor Patient priviledge for untold numbers of people by setting up fake vaccination clinics to sample DNA (which, if done here would have gotten his license taken away and gotten him slapped with serious violations of the law), never mind that he is a Pakistani national who essentially became a spie for a foeign government....
nope...somehow they don't understand why this guy is in prison.... even though they would hang him if he was an American and did the same things here.
I don't see whats so hard to understand. The law is great, as long as its convinent to the people in power. The rule of law apparently isn't supposed to apply to them or their sycophants.
Re:They did it... (Score:5, Informative)
It is a matter of record and fact: The US kills more innocent civilians in Yemen - or anywhere else, for that matter - than do any alleged 'al-qaeda' affiliates.
Jeremy Scahill, National Security reporter for The Nation:
"Saleh essentially made an agreement with the Obama administration to get an increase in his counterterrorism funding in return for allowing the United States to conduct various operations of its own, unilaterally. And so, effectively, counterterrorism funding for his regime became like crack cocaine. Yemen is the poorest country in the Arab world. His government was extremely corrupt. This was their cash cow, claiming that they were fighting terrorism.
And so what you've seen over the past 10, 12 years of history between the United States and Yemen is Ali Abdullah Saleh, when it was convenient for him, allowing the al-Qaida threat to flare up, looking the other way when 23 al-Qaida people broke out of the prison that they were supposed to be held in, actually allowing weapons to be smuggled into al-Qaida areas so that they would attack a police station, and then coming back to the United States and saying, oh, we really need more funding to go and fight these terrorists."
" the United States has sort of outsourced its intelligence operations in Yemen to Saudi Arabia and Yemen's security forces. And we've seen repeatedly over the past 10 years the Saudis and the Yemenis manipulate events regarding al-Qaida within Yemen to try to curry favor with the United States or to get more funding.
And so I just would sort of reserve commentary, as a reporter who's covered Yemen extensively and been there, on going too far down the line of guessing who this agent was, who he was working for, and what he actually did, because I've seen it too many times where someone's getting played, or someone's getting spun."
"Colleagues of mine who are in the south of Yemen right now and are on really the front lines of this drone war, my friend Iona Craig, who's a great reporter for the Times of London, was just saying to me that she met civilians who were severely burned from the drone strikes and that one civilian that she talked to said there were 26 people killed in the strike that he survived and was severely burned in."
"the U.S. bombed this village and killed 46 people, and we know the names of all of the people that were killed. I went there myself. I interviewed a woman who lost her entire family. An old man, 17 of those 46 people that were killed were members of his family. There were five pregnant women among the dead."
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/17/152854335/why-the-u-s-is-aggressively-targeting-yemen [npr.org]
Not quite true (Score:3, Informative)
Re:They did it... (Score:5, Informative)
In Pakistan alone - a country with which we are supposedly not at war - the US toll on civilians is outstanding in its atrocity:
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan [wikipedia.org], citing the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:
US Drone Strike statistic based on months of research by a team of journalists of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:
Total reported killed: 2,433 - 3,093
Civilians reported killed: 467 - 815
Children reported killed: 178
Total reported injured: 1,163 -1,268
Strikes under the Bush Administration: 52
Strikes under the Obama Administration: 267
Total strikes: 319
On 14 July 2009, Daniel L. Byman of the Brookings Institution stated that although accurate data on the results of drone strikes is difficult to obtain, it seemed that ten civilians had died in the drone attacks for every militant killed. He suggested that drone strikes may kill "10 or so civilians" for every militant killed, which would represent a civilian to combatant casualty ratio of 10:1. Byman argues that civilian killings constitute a humanitarian tragedy and create dangerous political problems, including damage to the legitimacy of the Pakistani government and alienation of the Pakistani populace from America. He suggested that the real answer to halting al-Qaeda's activity in Pakistan will be long-term support of Pakistan's counterinsurgency efforts.
-- Or you can believe the CIA, who are PAID NOT TO LIE!
It’s still an ACT OF WAR (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, the Al-Qaeda is evil. But from most of the world's standpoint, the US is even worse. (They killed hundrets of times as many people. Let alone all the meddling with foreign governments and secret prisons.)
So just as much as Al-Qaeda, backed by Pakistan's government, hacking US government websites, would be considered an act of war... ...this is also an act of war.
It's just that apparently, the ultra bully gets away with it...