Anonymous Vows Revenge For ISIS Paris Attacks 488
An anonymous reader writes: As usual, Anonymous members are quicker to respond to threats than investigators and have announced #OpParis as revenge for the Paris attacks. Their action is similar to #OpISIS from this spring, launched after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Previously Anonymous ousted thousands of ISIS Twitter accounts in #OpISIS. In a more conventional response, the government of France has been bombarding ISIS positions in Syria with airstrikes, and hunting for suspect Salah Abdeslam in connection with Friday's killings.
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As usual, Anonymous members are quicker to respond to threats than investigators
That's because they don't have any requirement to perform due diligence or, well, investigate anything. Investigators do. Anonymous are more like instigators.
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Why does anyone require 'due diligence' and fact-checking against insane violent assholes like these Sunni extremist fuckstains that laughingly call themselves the 'Islamic State'
Well, for a start, to make sure that's who's actually responsible. (Not saying they're not - or that they don't deserve action anyway, but if it weren't them, then another guilty party could be getting away with no action due to a lack of due diligence)
If you really want to know who is responsible ... (Score:3, Insightful)
... look to Saudi Arabia !
People simply can *NOT* get radicalized out of a vaccuum
Most of the sunni moslems get radicalized from the teachings of their imams, from the hate filled sermons uttered by the imams on the pulpit inside the mosques all over the world, and from the teachings they received when they were studying their 'peaceful religions' inside the madrasa ... and most of the imams, the mosques, the madrasas of the sunni sect in the whole world are being funded by the oil money from Saudi Arabia
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Why does anyone require 'due diligence' and fact-checking against insane violent assholes like these Sunni extremist fuckstains that laughingly call themselves the 'Islamic State' (as if they have the skillset or civilized restraint to actually run a country peacefully)?
Mainly so you don't accidentally kill the neighbor of the insane extremist, when the neighbor is actually a rather nice guy.
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911 AND ISIS are both examples of what happens when governments go off half cocked without thinking about the ramifications of their actions or long term consequences.
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Don't post angry, that's a bad idea. You may also want to consider other viewpoints than "exterminate them down to the last motherfucking one of them". Perhaps a quote from 'A man for all seasons' may help:
Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
===
Becomie a vigilante force to end another vigilante force and you have lost the battle, plain and simple. You are no better than them.
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Sir Thomas More was nothing but a goddamn SJW, with all his politically correct "laws".
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Grandparent was being sarcastic. On reality he agrees with the great-grandparent post.
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You may also want to consider other viewpoints than "exterminate them down to the last motherfucking one of them".
Tell you what: If they're kicking in your door to drag you out into the street and cut off your gods-be-damned head, let's see how well quoting shit like that works for you, OK? It's really easy for someone like you, who no doubt is sitting nice and safe in your house, probably in a 1st-world country like the U.S., to spout shit like that, when halfway across the world right now what I desscribed above is actually happening: someone is getting their door kicked in by some asshole 'islamic state' fighter who doesn't give a rat's ass about another human life, and they're going to drag the men out into the street and fucking kill them, and take the women and children and fucking enslave them, because they can. I got news for you, friend: There is no reasoning with these gods-be-damned animals, if there was then that's what would be happening, and if you can't see that then you need to wake the fuck up and get your head out of the gods-be-damned sand! By their own actions they have made it amply clear that the only way to deal with them is to kill them all, and if you continue to deny that then you're just fooling yourself. There is no magical speech you can give that is going to 'change hearts and minds' of ISIS and make them stop cutting off people's heads; they want to burn the world down to the ground and remake it in their own fucked-up twisted version of Islam, and they will kill everyone and anyone who gets in their way. I'm sorry, it sucks, it's horrifying, it's anti-civilization, it's anti-human, it's anti-life even, they are like the Berzerkers of Fred Saberhagen's science fiction novels, they want one thing and one thing only and there is no reasoning with them about it. You can even sit there and try to tell me "it's our fault we created them" and it doesn't fucking matter, we either kill them or they will kill everyone and everything you love, eventually. It's too late for talk. It's time for bombs and bullets, and that's the only way this gods-be-damned bullshit is going to end. I suggest you make your peace with that and move on with your life as best you can.
To the guy who said this:
The Koran instructs that all Muslims must move to live under a Caliphate if there is one. ISIS has now created one. In order to be a proper Muslim who follows their own holy book, they gotta support the Caliphate and they gotta support ISIS. The Koran is also very clear about what to do to Muslims who don't do that.
The Quran, just like the Bible, is a very, very old book, written by just another human, and like the Bible, it's contents are incredibly out-of-date and not particularly relevant to living in the modern world. Just like fundamentalist Christians, who try to live strictly according to the Bible with no compromises, you're going to run into all sorts of trouble trying to live strictly according to the Quran. Of course this has little to nothing to do with these Sunni extremists who refer to themselves as the 'islamic state'; just like so many so-called Christian preachers do, they're using their own strict interpretation of the Quran as an excuse to be violent assholes, destroy people they don't want around, seize power and land, and generally get away with whatever animalistic violent bullshit they want to get away with. Honestly, if there was such a being as 'Allah', I'd hope he/she/it would erase these fuckers from the planet, for daring to commit such atrocities. Regardless any 'reasons' these violent assholes claim to have are irrelevant; they must be exterminated regardless, because they endanger and victimize the populations of entire countries in their bloodthirsty quest for power. 'No quarter asked or given' should be the gist of any Rules of Engagement with regards to them, since that's abou
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Don't offer such tempting questions!
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Why does anyone require 'due diligence' and fact-checking against insane violent assholes
This is why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The due diligence isn't for checking whether ISIS is responsible, or a worthy target. The due diligence is for making sure that the people you're attacking are actually ISIS.
We've seen some pretty high-profile examples of Anonymous having some, shall we say, targeting mishaps in the past. And if you need a citation for that, you don't know enough about Anonymous to participate in this conversation.
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It also sounds like Anonymous. Say, you don't think...
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All we know so far is that one of the attackers was a French citizen. Giving the information currently available the most appropriate place for the French air force to bomb would be France.
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While anger is understandable, taking action, before first verifying that you are targeting the right people, leads all too often to miscarriages of justice. It is sombering to note that, even where some degree of due filigence is done, an estimated 1 in 25 people executed in the US are innocent of the crimes for which they are being executed. A majority of those originally locked up for years in Guantanamo are
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We have this thing, supposedly, called the rule of law. This means that you're not guilty until the state has achieved the burden of proof required to deem you guilty. As deplorable as these people are, I'd rather we not dismantle the very principles we've agreed on in an effort to contain or punish them. The adage about staring into an abyss is acceptable here.
Your kind of thinking is how we ended up with things like the PATRIOT ACT and other assorted rights restrictions. How many rights are you willing to give up? You know, any rights you give up for these people are also your rights and even if you don't make use of them personally, there are many others who do - and not for bad effect. The very idea of needing to prove guilt is not something that should ever be subject to debate unless it means increasing the burden of proof. Another adage, one that it is better for ten men to go free than to put one innocent one behind bars, is also appropriate.
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FTFY. Not-so-fun fact: If you are killed by an Islamist terrorist, you are eight times more likely to be Muslim than non-Muslim.
Maybe you could start by opening your home to a Syrian refugee. People fleeing the "death cult" are precisely the sort of people who could do with your help.
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That's very idealistic and glib, except that one survey has shown that 13% of Syrian refugees support ISIS [clarionproject.org]. Would you take a 1 in 8 chance that your houseguest wants to kill you? And even the ones who aren't terror-supporters now are still Muslims (mostly), which means they carry the same memetic infection that produced ISIS (and all the other Islamic radical groups). There's a good chance that some of their kids and grandkids will be radicals, as France has learned: many of their "home-grown" radical Islamists are from Algerian families that came to France generations ago.
In short, just because they are refugees doesn't necessarily make them good people.
Sorry, but you and much of the West are being played for suckers. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have plenty of money and room for their co-religionists. They're all part of the ummah, right? But they don't want a bunch of poor and semi-skilled people with a heavy sprinkling of terror-supporters. Why burden their welfare rolls and strain their societies? Better to fob off the refugees on Europe (and the US), where they can spread Islam and soak up Western welfare money. It is a core Muslim belief that the entire Earth will one day be Muslim. The Muslim world is taking advantage of the Syrian war to spread Islam. We are fools to go along with it.
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[...] except that one survey has shown that 13% of Syrian refugees support ISIS [clarionproject.org]. Would you take a 1 in 8 chance that your houseguest wants to kill you?
No, it didn't. [dohainstitute.org]
The question was "In general, do you have a postitive or negative view of ISIL?" 4% of Syrian refugees answered "positive", and 9% said "positive to some extent". That is not the same as 13% expressing "support" for ISIS.
Moreover:
The survey didn't expand on "military achievements", but it wouldn't surprise me if the most common reason for a Syrian refugee holding a positive (or mildly positive) view of ISIS is that nobody else is trying to oust the Ba'athist regime.
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Yes you do. Well, no, you don't because you're a willfully ignorant twat. However, they do give aid to Africans. I can dig out a shitton of evidence but will you accept Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In 2006, the Saudi government gave $10 million in aid to the horn of Africa, through the World Food Programme, of which Kenya received $2 million.[19] Saudi prince Al-Walid bin Talal donated $1 million to help feed 3.5 million Kenyans during the drought.[20]
I'm sure that I can dig out more. So yes, I *do* see the Saudis giving out aid, specifically, to help with famines in Africa. You do not see it because you will not see it. I can see, now, why you'd want to post as an AC.
Over the past decade Saudi Arabia has been the 19th largest government provider of humanitarian assistance.
http://www.globalhumanitariana... [globalhuma...stance.org]
There are enough things to be angry about wi
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Here's the thing: if you're a Muslim, and you don't support ISIS, you're a shitty Muslim. It's identical to Christians who claim homosexuality "isn't sinful:" they're shitty Christians.
The Koran instructs that all Muslims must move to live under a Caliphate if there is one. ISIS has now created one. In order to be a proper Muslim who follows their own holy book, they gotta support the Caliphate and they gotta support ISIS. The Koran is also very clear about what to do to Muslims who don't do that. And it's
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In much the same way that being a good Christian does not require you to stone adulterers and people who wear cotton-poly blends, Christianity as a general system of faith does not inherently declare homosexuality to be sinful. Jesus gave a new covenant, superseding the Old Testament laws, including that one. The only New Testament bits about homosexuality are in Paul's writing, and that translation is considered dubious by many biblical scholars. So although one could argue that Christians of certain s
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It is not a true Caliphate, because it does not operate according to generally accepted Islamic principles. The rising tide if Islamophobia scares me a lot more than ISIS. The prospect of another holocause in, so called, civilized Western countries is becoming a very real possibility. The fact that the vast majority of Islamic teachers preach against Islamic fundamentalism, in general, and ISIS in particular, is simply ignored. I live in a country with 4 million Muslims and cannot recall a single case of on
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FTFY. Not-so-fun fact: If you are killed by an Islamist terrorist, you are eight times more likely to be Muslim than non-Muslim.
Islamist terrorists tend to kill mostly Muslims in Muslim countries and mostly Westerners in Western countries. There are more Muslim casualties because most of the killings occur in Muslim countries.
Should Westerners be afraid of risks that are relatively lower? Well, it depends on what you're comparing to. The per capita risk for Westerners is lower compared to the risk for a different country but is higher compared to the risk in the past. For Westerners who never had an intention of traveling to tho
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At least with Daesh, you're better off as a Christian or Jew, where you can get away with surrendering and paying taxes, than as a "moderate Muslim", where you're likely to be declared an apostate and murdered.
I don't know the relative likelihood of death based on religious identification, but I'm skeptical that the Islamic State would be so "gracious" towards Christians and Jews. There are at least reports of Christians killed for the sin of being Christian.
This is perhaps one area where ISIS has succeeded -- in convincing some outsiders of the relative beneficence of the self-proclaimed caliphate.
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ISIS's name is “al-Dawla al-Islamiya fi Iraq wa al-Sham.” is converted to an acronym Daesh which is an Arabic word
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As someone who has traveled the globe, to some extent, including into areas with active conflict zones (a turn of phrase that I don't prefer but will save time by using it - clarification is available if requested) - I've been in majority-Muslim countries. I've been in areas where there are armed children on the street. I've been in areas where the people are truly desperate.
So, while this may seem an appeal to authority - that is not my intent, this is my experience so it is anecdotal and only my observati
Well, at least they're hard to retaliate against. (Score:2)
At least Anonymous has the advantage of being difficult for ISIS to target, unlike military or police forces, or even intelligence services operated by nation-states. How much they can actually accomplish remains to be seen.
Re:Well, at least they're hard to retaliate agains (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, at least they're hard to retaliate agains (Score:5, Insightful)
IS will ignore Anonymous, military, cops, and intelligence services in favor of unsuspecting theatergoers and people out for an evening at a cafe. Military and cops shoot back, and Anonymous is simply impotent against an organization like IS.
That depends on whether Anonymous plans do useless stuff like tear down ISIS websites or something useful like hack the PCs of ISIS leaders and steal their financial records or details of their oil smuggling operation which would be most useful to the military and the cops even if it would probably embarrass Turkish president Erdoan and his AKP party pretty severely but then they have it coming.
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hack the PCs of ISIS leaders
Which is bullshit. They need to hack the PCs of the national governments and corporations that finance them. To bring down ISIS means to bring down everything.
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Which ones might well be revealed by the records within the PCs of the leaders of ISIS. But good luck trying to find that information.
OTOH, bombing doesn't do that much good, either. It definitely convinces the population of the area bombed that you are the enemy. Many of them might well not have believed that before you dropped a bomb on their sister or at their uncle's funeral.
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Anonymous is not difficult to target. The Zetas drug cartel did it quite successfully.
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Just brainstorming here, but you think we could hire the Zetas Cartel to go after ISIS?
if they really want revenge (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:if they really want revenge (Score:5, Insightful)
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The Islamic State calls it self like that because theybalready have conquered an area nearly as big as Syria, covering parts of syria and parts of Iraq, aproaching Bagdad till a few miles.
They conquered that a year ago, thanks for waking up.
And they call that their 'State'.
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The IS propaganda machine is a hit-n-run operation, they probably lose accounts and sites all the time for violating the terms of service but they just make more. I very much doubt Anonymous is capable of exposing someone who likes to disappear like a fart in the wind, just like Anonymous themselves. Sure hacking into their internal networks would be nice, but that sounds like very legitimate targets for the NSA and friends and that's assuming they're exposed to the Internet in any meaningful way. They migh
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It takes a thief to catch a thief
That's the name of the game here. Anonymous no doubt has it's high-level operatives who can stick-and-move on the same level as the hackers working for these Sunni extremists can -- and if they know how they operate, then they know how to smoke them out, too. All it takes is getting a solid lead on one of their Internet operatives, and the right people getting their hands on them. Regardless of whether or not something as fortuitous as that happens, harassing and disrupting their Inter
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What happened to the all powerful NSA / CIA I am always hearing about on slashdot? Don't they have nightly backups of the entire internet? Have ISIS admins somehow closed the NSA's infamous backdoors? Why are the spooks who broke Iran's centrifuges with social engineering and sophisticated malware suddenly incapable of hacking a garden variety web site?
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If you join the military, all you will be doing is bombing (maybe) combatants in Syria. The people who perpetrated the attack in Paris obviously were not in Syria.
Anonymous has the ability to sniff out and actually PREVENT further attacks.
Of course, they also have the ability to SWAT Counter
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> Fighting ISIS by joining the military is a lot like fighting Morpheus in the matrix.
Agreed.
"Fighting for Peace is like Fucking for Virginity"
Violence only begets violence. Work smarter, not harder.
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they would sign up for the military and go bust some rear
Joining the military incurs certain obligations, such as obeying chain of command, and following rules of engagement.
Both of these hamper military efforts against terrorists, who tend to jump to the far side of the line a military unit can not cross, and then yell "Neener, neener!".
Not having these restrictions is sometimes useful.
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Bust some rear?
Hold back much?
Did you see his handle name? Most likely he is still in the process of typing out it his comment.
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The thing about the "bombing ISIS positions"... (Score:2)
implies that they had information about Daesh targets beforehand, but chose for some reason or another not to hit them before now. Because they sure hit them fast - the last I checked they hit over 30 targets in Raqqah today - they're not just suddenly discovering new things
Now why could that be - why would they have targets they weren't hitting? The only logical reason is that the combination of the value of the targets and their confidence in what they're hitting was lower than the risk of hitting innoce
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There are other considerations as well. You can only fly so many sorties per day at a sustainable level over a longer term so all targets need to be prioritised against each other. RIght now the French authorities are going to be absolutely pissed so they are likely operating at the short term sprint level. Without getting additional equipment to the area and additional people to the area the step up in attacks will likely be unsustainable.
According to http://www.theguardian.com/wor... [theguardian.com] they have 12 strik
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It's a lot more of a commitment then show the flag. And redeploying advanced fighters doesn't happen over night. When you consider that the entire French airforce has about 156 suitable strike aircraft in its fleet you see deploying 12 or nearly 10% is a big commitment. They have also announced prior to the latest attack that they were deploying their aircraft carrier to the region.
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A first world country like France? What, like the UK, which spends more on defence per year than France and would struggle to even put 12 ground attack aircraft operational over Syria?
Maybe France has spent more wisely than my own government though. Maybe.
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Considering that the Charles de Gaul is currently on route to or is pounding IS targets in Iraq, and is capable of upwards of 30 sorties a day with their current pilot status, they could easily shift assets.
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It's not there yet. Once the CdG is there then yes they will be able to increase sorties. The CdG carries 21 strike air craft but the biggest difference is the mission time is halved compared to the bases in the UAE.
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It's not there yet.
Mid air refuelling. It's already close enough.
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Makes for really long mission times, reduces payload and puts way more strain on the planes and the pilots. I doubt that it is worth it at this time as they are not supporting ground troops or intercepting things that will cause them damage.
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Oh definitely. But all the reports indicate 10 French aircraft were involved. Given they have 12 stationed in the UAE and those were the planes that were active in that theatre already it would be highly unlikely for it to be any CdG craft.
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Well you'd be stupid to say where craft are launching sorties from unless it's in your and the host countries best interest. Otherwise you're painting a target on their back.
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Why? It's not like ISIS has any capability to shoot down the fighters and the planes are well known to be stationed in the UAE. They aren't going to run into opposition on the way to target. We're not talking a fight between equals here.
The French have the capability to bomb any target in the region at will and there is nothing ISIS can do to stop them. All ISIS can hope for is to obscure or harden their assets enough to with stand the bombs. Or to have so many low value assets that a bomb costs more t
Re:The thing about the "bombing ISIS positions"... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm no proponent of "Victory through Air-Power," but as long as we have Air Supremacy, we might as well make proper use of it. (Why go all the trouble to get it if we're not going to use it?) Cut their supply lines, bomb any supply dumps we can locate and attack any truck convoys we find. That will isolate their front-line troups, making it easier for our ground forces to smash them and win the war. Make no mistake: it's the infantry and armor who are going to finish this in the long run, but the Air Force can make their job much easier if they do their part properly.
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A *MUCH* better idea than bombing civilian targets, who might well not be opposed to you if they had a choice.
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why would they have targets they weren't hitting?
Compiling an intelligence base before flinging ordnance around willy-nilly and revealing what they know about?
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taking out a conventional city that ISIS wholly controls in a Dresden like firebombing is now perfectly acceptable
No, it's a war crime and can be prosecuted under international law.
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Re:Sometimes there are no innocents (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure. Except the IS doesn't have any cities. They occupy some territory in Iraq and Syria, where they're mostly bent on executing the majority of the populace. The Nazis would have laughed pretty hard if the allied strategy in WWII was extermination bombing of Jewish neighbourhoods in Paris.
You're absolutely right, the way to attack the islamic state is to attack it's ability to wage war. Stop converting moderate muslims into new recruits, stop littering the area with weapons and political instability, and work towards not giving any more money to oil rich middle eastern dictatorships.
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Only if you lose, and probably not then.
I wish I could believe I was being cynical.
Re:Sometimes there are no innocents (Score:4, Informative)
You realize that Raqqah is one of the largest cities in Syria, right? People there don't have a choice about "working with Daesh". Daesh runs the city, and every city within a great distance around them. And does all sorts of measures to prevent people from leaving.
These are people living in a densely populated city. Their city is being bombed. This puts them at risk. Some targets are low civilian risk. Others are high civilian risk. France's sudden intensive wave of bombing means that they've shifted the dividing line on the amount of risk to civilians they're willing to take.
Where to start?
1) There were two separate programs: the Pentagon program and the CIA program. The Pentagon program was a total failure. The CIA program was an unexpectedly huge success (perhaps too much - the FSA's rapid advances and breakinto Latakia triggered Russia and Iran's freakout and doubling down in Syria).
2) None of the soldiers trained by the Pentagon "prompty joined Daesh". The first handful of soldiers were poorly inserted, in way too small numbers and unevenly. They never manged to form into a unit in Syria. Some of them never made it into Syria. Others made it into Syria but were captured by al-Nusra, only released after negotiators convinced al-Nusra that they were focused only on Daesh. The few that made it into Syria and weren't captured were too disorganized to form a unit.
The Pentagon program - in stark contrast to the CIA program - was a colossal failure. But let's not spew falsehoods about it.
Beyond all of this are other actions that have been taken that are not part of these "programs". Most recently has been the arming of the YPG and arab militias - nominally just the latter, so as not to tick off Turkey, but in practice both - to resist Daesh in northeastern Syria. This effort too has been quite success thusfar, although it's too young to really evaluate at this point, and there's some risk of future seeds of discord being sown.
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Correction(s) (Score:2)
The U.S. chose to withdraw from both Iraq and Afghanistan (though in reality they only withdrew to Iraq, and stopped withdrawing from Afghanistan once they realized how badly they had screwed up Iraq by withdrawing way too soon).
Obama claims he had no choice but to withdraw, but he very much wanted to and you'd have to be an idiot to think we couldn't have stayed had we just asked. We should have at least asked.
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" you'd have to be an idiot to think we couldn't have stayed had we just asked. "
Bush negotiated the withdrawal date with the Iraqi government. When the date was approaching, the idea of an ongoing U.S. presence was indeed proposed, but the Iraqis refused to renew the Status Of Forces Agreement(SOFA). That's the agreement which grants U.S. military personnel the permission to operate with impunity inside the country. This was unacceptable to the USA. I suppose Obama could have forced the issue, but base
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More specifically, we have Russia (nuclear) on the Assad side, along with Iran (nearly nuclear), while on the other side, we have the coalition (including nuclear powers US, UK and France), and then there are third parties, including Israel (who's started bombing Hezbollah weapons shipments within Syria - including bombing the Damascus airport the other day) and major rebel weapons supplier Saudi Arabia (not nuclear, but believed to have an agreement with Pakistan to be able to rapidly acquire nuclear weapo
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Iran are not "nearly nuclear". They have shown no interest in nuclear weapons with their program. The Ayatollah has issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons in their hands. Mossad don't believe them to be trying to make nuclear weapons, and the CIA and SIS ('MI6') agree.
Re:The thing about the "bombing ISIS positions"... (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds ridiculous on the face of it because everyone is nominally adimantly opposed to it, but that is an actual possibility here. If any coalition ground troops end up getting deployed in response to these (or future) attacks, they'd take over eastern Syria, where Daesh has its "caliphate"...but stop advancing west because A) they have no interest in taking land from the FSA and probably don't want to turn the Army of Conquest into a hostile force, B) Russia is heavily bombing there, and C) Russia would only let go of Latakia through their cold dead hands - it has their only Mediterranean naval base, their largest airbase in the region, one of their most important listening posts, etc. So you have the "clearly Russian" zone, the "clearly Coalition" zone, and then this in-between squabble area (including Damascus).
Of course, this is all assuming that Russia can actually defend Latakia against the rebels. I mean, normally I'd assume that, but they've done a pretty crappy job of it so far. But I bet they could put a lot more assets there if they needed to (though it might take weakening their forces on Donbas). It's easy for them to deploy air assets to Syria because they're not needed in Donbas, but if they take too much ground forces from Donbas and Crimea, Ukraine might be tempted to reescalate. The other issue is Iran, Iran could also commit itself a lot more to Syria if they need to... the current few thousand Iranian troops (plus Hezbollah) is one thing, but it's a small fraction of their total military manpower. Plus, a lot of the Syrian/Russian/Iranian/Hezbollah assets are currently directed on the Aleppo offensive, which actually has gone pretty well for them... so that could be redirected to Latakia if need be. And to Hama too, the way things are going on that front.
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It's easy for them to deploy air assets to Syria because they're not needed in Donbas, but if they take too much ground forces from Donbas and Crimea, Ukraine might be tempted to reescalate.
Even the highest estimates were that <1% of the Russian armed forces were in Ukraine (7,000 of 771,000), if it's just to maintain the image of a fighting force I don't think they have any problems finding the manpower. Besides, an assault by Ukranian forces would give Russia an excuse to declare that Kiev is now the aggressor and officially roll in the tanks to protect the Russian minority. Even if Putin gets caught a bit off guard, it seems extremely unlikely he would lose face without action and the bi
Uh-oh, this is not good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Those ISIS guys better watch now! Anonymous will be sending a barrage of pizzas to them that they didn't even order, and probably posting some dick pics on the their websites!
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No no, you got it all wrong (again!)
They will put bacon and ham on it!
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Wait a minute... (Score:2, Insightful)
Two weeks ago more people were killed on the russian plane. Where did these anonymous guys were at that time?
The best approach for Anonymous (Score:5, Interesting)
Anonymous could do the most good by hacking into and diverting - or simply revealing, if nothing else is possible - the finances of ISIS. Is there any hackable digital money stream involved, or is at all greasy piles of cash?
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A lot of it is from oil smuggling. They even have truck-mounted "mobile refineries" - you can buy them off of Alibaba - so they're not just selling crude, but refined gasoline and diesel ready for consumption. They load straight into tanker trucks which deliver straight to gas stations, yielding an estimated $2m per day in revenue.
You can make an awful lot of explosive vests and buy an awful lot of AK47s with a good chunk of a billion USD per year. The coalition keeps targeting them, but they just keep buy
A kind of "Nous sommes des Inconnus" .. (Score:5, Interesting)
How we respond to them is difficult to work out. Maybe the Anon approach of hacking and defacing their web sites - cutting off the oxygen of publicity - would be a Good Idea. It may be better than trying to pick the right targets out of the desert with smart bombs and drones. It might be better than turning the entire region into green, glowing glass.
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You're right. We think too small. The answer is clear. While we talk and talk about the evil of ISIS and the refugees and the "need" to vet these people. we leave 6.5 million+ Syrians at the mercy of Assad or ISIS or Russian bombings or US bombings or French bombings. We're all being monsters to these people. The death of 129 Parisians is nothing compared to the horror that
Re:A kind of "Nous sommes des Inconnus" .. (Score:4, Insightful)
No. They have no military capability in the West, and can only sponsor terrorism operations. Terrorism doesn't threaten our way of life, although overreactions to terrorism can.
Dear Anonymous... (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing you can do is screw with their social media, make it look as if ISIS hates Allah and Mohammed, not in big ways that are obvious, but smaller that makes recruits stand back and second guess. Undermine their ability to recruit anyone and recruit money and they will crumble faster than 10,000 bombs can hurt them.
Sever their income, destroy their ability to recruit and communicate. and please do it decently instead of carpet bombing that gets a lot of innocents as well. redirect their bank accounts to supporting Israel or other groups they hate.
Reveal all their financial supporters, and feel free to drain their accounts as well.
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One thing you can do is screw with their social media, make it look as if ISIS hates Allah and Mohammed, not in big ways that are obvious, but smaller that makes recruits stand back and second guess.
Interesting. One sometimes hears in the media things like "Islam is a peaceful religion" and "ISIS does not represent true Islam." I don't know enough about Islam to make a judgement either way. But let's assume that those statements are correct. What better way would there be to ruin a peaceful religion than by conducting a variety of barbaric acts in its name and vigorously publicizing them worldwide via the Internet? For example, you could behead journalists, burn captured pilots alive in a cage, tr
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It's the latest trend. The US nailed one in Afghanistan recently, Russia's hit nearly half a dozen since they started bombing Syria... come on, why can't France get in on the game? You know France doesn't like falling behind on trends. Maybe they're trying to start a new trend with bombing football stadiums?
It's unfortunate, but "suddenly coming up with three dozen targets to strike in one day" when the whole coalition had just been bombing a few per day recently means striking targets that have a higher ri
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