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al-Nusra Top Dawg dies in Idlib airstrike
Today's Headlines
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Page 4: Opinion
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Arabia
Our selfishness regarding terrorism
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] I do not think there is a serious examination of the ideas that generate terrorism. There is no organized and detailed review in Muslim communities. We are subject to the logic of reactions, quick convictions, apologetic and moral attitudes that are closer to self-exoneration than a real sense of the depth of the tragedy being faced.

Instead of taking into consideration what victims of terrorism have endured, the focus is on potential acts against Muslims and veiled women in Europe. Others are concerned about the image of Islam being tarnished.

All these stances revolve around fearing for ourselves, not for others. This shows our indifference toward them, and how we do not value humanity unless it impacts us, positively or negatively.
Humanity

We should recognize that a human being is valuable, with rights and respect regardless of race, religion or color. Terrorism violates the human values that manage relationships between societies.

British philosopher John Locke said: "No one has the right, in any way, to harm another person because they belong to another church or religion." He added that "all the rights and privileges belonging to a person as a human being or citizen shall be maintained and not violated," and that "rights and privileges have nothing to do with religion."

Religion cannot be imposed on others, or be the basis for one’s relationship with society. Relationships in the modern state between individuals have a civil contractual character. Muslim societies still suffer from a problem of identity and relations with the other.

Adonis believes that "the human being is the one who creates his identity with innovative ideas and work." This awareness is missing from the collective mind of Muslim societies, causing them to be more fundamentalist and inward in order to defend their existence from an imagined threat.
Posted by: Fred || 04/05/2016 00:00 || Comments || Link || [8 views] Top|| File under: Govt of Saudi Arabia

#1  ....and moral attitudes that are closer to self-exoneration than a real sense of the depth of the tragedy being faced.

I believe the word you are searching for is complicity.
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/05/2016 3:22 Comments || Top||

#2  We should recognize that a human being is valuable, with rights and respect regardless of race, religion or color.

What a concept! There may yet be hope for these people.
Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 || 04/05/2016 11:51 Comments || Top||

#3  What a concept! There may yet be hope for these people.

There's an old saying about the Devil being able to recite Scripture...
Posted by: Pappy || 04/05/2016 18:23 Comments || Top||

#4  I'm sure if we look up 'human being' in the index, it means everyone except Juice, Crusaders, infidels and the wrong kind of Muslim.
Posted by: SteveS || 04/05/2016 22:30 Comments || Top||


Home Front: Politix
Was An Asian Government Reading Hillary's Emails In February 2009?
I continue to be fascinated by the very early chapters of the Hillary Clinton homebrew email saga. For one simple reason: the clintonemail.com server apparently didn't have the digital certificate needed to encrypt communications until late March 2009 -- more than two months after the server was up and running, and after Secretary Clinton's swearing-in on January 22.

Two questions are raised by this timing: First, why didn't the server have encryption from the start? And second, why did it get encryption in March, at a time when Clinton should have been extraordinarily busy getting up to speed at State, not messing with computer security protocols?

The simplest answer to the first question is that the lack of a certificate was just a mistake. But what about the second? What inspired the Secretary to get an encryption certificate in March when her team hadn't bothered to get one in January or February?

The likely answer to that question is pretty troubling. There now seems to be a very real probability that Hillary Clinton rushed to install an encryption certificate in March 2009 because the U.S. intelligence community caught another country reading Clinton's unencrypted messages during her February 16-21, 2009, trip to China, Indonesia, Japan, and S. Korea.
Uh oh. This may explain why Hillary kept saying she wasn't using it until a couple months after she set it up . . . .
Thanks to FOIA lawsuits, the State Department has released a few documents from this early period. They show that Clinton began using the clintonemail.com server as early as January 28, 2009, just after her inauguration. Other messages from Cheryl Mills used the server in early February.

Even as she kept her homebrew server, Clinton and her staff were fighting to hang on to their Blackberries, just like President Obama. That provoked resistance from the State Department's top security official, Assistant Secretary Eric Boswell. On March 2, he sent the Secretary a memo -- "Use of Blackberries on Mahogany Row" -- declaring that "the vulnerabilities and risks associated with the use of Blackberries in Mahogany Row [the State Department's seventh floor executive offices] considerably outweigh their convenience."

On March 11, at a staff meeting, Clinton seemed to throw in the towel on her Blackberry, telling Boswell that she had read the memo and "gets it." We know this from correspondence among Boswell's staff.

But what's fascinating and troubling is something else in the correspondence. One staff message says that during Clinton's conversation with Boswell, "her attention was drawn to a sentence that indicates we [the diplomatic security office] have intelligence concerning this vulnerability during her recent trip to Asia."

I am struck by the mix of delicacy and insistence in that phrasing. It seems likely that Clinton's attention was drawn to that sentence because the intelligence was about Secretary Clinton's own communications security, something a discreet diplomat would not want to say directly in written communications. Clinton certainly acted like the intelligence concerned her. She asked Boswell to get her "the information." On March 11, Boswell is told by his staff that the report is already on the classified system, and he is reminded that he had already been briefed on it. Presumably he conveyed it to Clinton soon after March 11.

Eighteen days later, Clinton's server acquires a digital certificate supporting TLS encryption, closing the biggest security hole in her server.
Yeah. And the rest just barely leaked everything on the server.
I suppose this could all be coincidence, but the most likely scenario is that the Secretary's Asia trip produced an intelligence report that was directly relevant to the security of Clinton's communications. And that the report was sufficiently dramatic that it spurred Clinton to make immediate security changes on her homebrew server.

Did our agencies see Clinton's unencrypted messages transiting foreign networks? Did they spot foreign agencies intercepting those messages? It's hard to say, but either answer is bad, and the quick addition of encryption to the server suggests that Clinton saw it that way too.
Then she forgot all aobut it until the requisite two years slipped by, after which nothing matters to a liberal.
If that's what happened, it would raise more questions. Getting a digital certificate to support encryption is hardly a comprehensive response to the server's security vulnerabilities. So who decided that that was all the security it needed? How pointed was the warning about her Asia trip? Does it expand the circle of officials who should have known about and addressed the server's insecurity? And why, despite evidence that Clinton was using the server in connection with work in January and February, did Clinton turn over no emails before March 18?

We don't know the answers to those questions, and they may have perfectly good answers. But they do suggest that the investigation should be focusing heavily on who did what to clintonemail.com in January through March of 2009.
Posted by: gorb || 04/05/2016 02:02 || Comments || Link || [1 views] Top|| File under:

#1  I suppose this could all be coincidence, but the most likely scenario is that the Secretary's Asia trip produced an intelligence report that was directly relevant to the security of Clinton's communications. And that the report was sufficiently dramatic that it spurred Clinton to make immediate security changes on her homebrew server.

Yep, but the foreign intercept has already occurred, so a 'certificate' is then needed for CYA purposes... just my guess.

And my second guess is, DoS Diplomatic Security (DS) was tipped off by Another Government agency regarding the potential security breach and foreign intercepts. I say that because, unless some significant job responsibilities have occurred, DS does not have that type of capability.

Looks like the notification of a breach was a 'one off.' Someone may have been told that 'future monitoring was unnecessary' now that the certification was in place... so no worries, go the fok away and leave us alone!

Whatever happened, an accurate and realistic damage assessment would have to have concluded a likely compromise did in fact take place.
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/05/2016 3:02 Comments || Top||

#2  Looks like the notification of a breach was a 'one off.' Someone may have been told that 'future monitoring was unnecessary' now that the certification was in place... so no worries, go the fok away and leave us alone!

I'm guessing Hilda is so ignorant about electronic communications that didn't imagine that someone was watching her. She probably had a little talk with someone who told someone else to look the other way, thereby "solving" the "inconvenient" problem.
Posted by: gorb || 04/05/2016 11:13 Comments || Top||

#3  If I am reading this correctly, she was in Asia using an unencrypted connection to her private FOIA-proof email server. So, whoever was acting as her ISP had access to everything going out and coming it over that connection.

It boggles the mind. She gladly hands it all over to a foreign government rather than accept the possibility that the US public might have a right to see what she's up to.
Posted by: Iblis || 04/05/2016 12:16 Comments || Top||

#4  She gladly hands it all over to a foreign government rather than accept the possibility that the US public might have a right to see what she's up to.

Nothing to do with "right to see" - more of a matter of "what's convenient for me."

To paraphrase: never attribute to malice what can be accounted for by sheer egotism.
Posted by: Pappy || 04/05/2016 13:16 Comments || Top||

#5  She gladly hands it all over to a foreign government rather than accept the possibility that the US public might have a right to see what she's up to.

But because of the scandal, the American public is seeing it anyway. Oh well -- another demonstration that smart and wise are not necessarily connected.
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/05/2016 14:20 Comments || Top||

#6  Nothing to do with "right to see" - more of a matter of "what's convenient for me."

I have heard no rationale for the private server that makes sense except that, as private property, it would be exempt from FOIA requests. If someone has a better explanation, I am all ears.
Posted by: Iblis || 04/05/2016 14:27 Comments || Top||

#7  the foreign intercept has already occurred, so a 'certificate' is then needed for CYA purposes.

My understanding is that the encryption was installed incorrectly, and never fixed. Very simply Hillary's server was always compromised, and accessed by to other governments about 2 weeks after she was sworn in.

Al
Posted by: Frozen Al || 04/05/2016 14:46 Comments || Top||

#8  Was any Asian Government not reading Hillary emails?

It'll be a shorter list I'm sure.
Posted by: CrazyFool || 04/05/2016 17:12 Comments || Top||

#9  I have heard no rationale for the private server that makes sense except that, as private property, it would be exempt from FOIA requests. If someone has a better explanation, I am all ears. Posted by Iblis

Gov't business doesn't stop being gov't business just because it's done over a non-gov't system. My take on it anyway... who really knows at this point.
Posted by: Besoeker || 04/05/2016 17:14 Comments || Top||

#10  If someone has a better explanation, I am all ears.

Ah, but will you listen?
Posted by: Pappy || 04/05/2016 18:24 Comments || Top||

#11  Paps:

Depends on who's talking, and how much sense they're making.
Posted by: || 04/05/2016 21:00 Comments || Top||


Home Front: WoT
How Bad Would A Radiological Terror Attack Be?
Something pleasant to start off your week.

Design your own terror attack here.
Posted by: Vast Right Wing Conspiracy || 04/05/2016 00:00 || Comments || Link || [2 views] Top|| File under:

#1  here...is not found.

So many opportunities though:
1) Spread it where people will access it. Not a bomb, thats too local.
2) Maybe a watersupply? Again local, unless its the water used to deice airplanes. Then the plane and operators are out of commission, as will be the flight facility. That's a pretty big group.
3) Most any harbor with handling equipment for offloading container ships. Contaminate the equipment and force another destination, thereby destroying cost schedules, schedule lead times, consuming more fuel and impacting the arrival gates of the 2nd port of interest.
4) Tossed from the overpass onto the roof of any innercity people mover will get the equipment, the riders, the tracks and tunnels, and will also generate a plume for the neighborhood in which it travels.

Though they can be the same, there are different benefits to targeting people or infrastructure. Dirty-nuke a bus station and and the facility is out of work with some people sick. Get it into the water supply of a small city and you bring near-term radiation illness to the locals and it gets some news, maybe.

Make more bombs and change the batteries in the 'football' and we get the scenarios represented in 1950s science fiction.
Posted by: Skidmark || 04/05/2016 0:52 Comments || Top||

#2  http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Posted by: Thing Angulet1502 || 04/05/2016 2:05 Comments || Top||

#3  feh. The worst damage from such a device would be the collateral damage from the panicky over-reaction of the "Civil Authorities" and the ignorant & gullible urbanites.

If you do manage to get dusted by one, just walk away upwind, jettison your clothes before entering your house or other shelter and take a shower immediately. Do not attempt to retrieve your clothes. More detailed instructions on how to handle contamination can be quickly looked up on the inter-tubes.

These things were looked at repeatedly ever since the early 1950's, and were determined to be "Of propaganda value only".
Posted by: Nguard || 04/05/2016 2:24 Comments || Top||

#4  More people will be killed in car crashes as panicked people flee than by a dirty bomb.

Personally, I'd introduce it into the air conditioning system during a UN General Assembly meeting.

Might as well do some good.
Posted by: phil_b || 04/05/2016 6:39 Comments || Top||

#5  #3 and #4 - you'll be glad to know an article in Scientific American came to the same conclusion 15-20 years ago. The amount of unusable real estate would be pretty small and dependent on the wind. Some real estate is both very expensive and densely populated.
Posted by: Bobby || 04/05/2016 8:14 Comments || Top||

#6  Personally, I'd introduce it into the air conditioning system during a UN General Assembly meeting.

I don't know Phil - the radioactive isotopes will probably get pretty sick...
Posted by: CrazyFool || 04/05/2016 8:37 Comments || Top||

#7  Been there, seen it, done it. It's largely hysterics driven by (you know who) the MSM and Hollyweird. Fear sells.

For those in need Google FM 3-05.70 Survival, for Chapter 23, SURVIVAL IN MAN-MADE HAZARDS.
Posted by: Procopius2k || 04/05/2016 8:41 Comments || Top||

#8  Does anybody think that terrorists could do a better job than TEPCO (Fukushima) has already done?
Or than an EMP (attack or solar eruption, you pick)
will do?

(were those days are not shortend, no flesh would survive)
Posted by: skeezix4089 || 04/05/2016 10:30 Comments || Top||

#9  The most dangerous place on Earth

Pakiwakiland has supplied tactical nukes to its captains on the border without secure controls back to the president. The captains have control.
Posted by: 3dc || 04/05/2016 10:53 Comments || Top||

#10  here...is not found.

Fixed. Enjoy!
Posted by: trailing wife || 04/05/2016 14:24 Comments || Top||

#11  No one has died from Fukushima -- the panic and fear-mongering was ten or twelve orders of magnitude worse than the reality.

As for a solar event -- ain't nothing man-made that can match nature.
Posted by: Rob Crawford || 04/05/2016 15:34 Comments || Top||

#12  Don't you mean "factor" rather than "order of magnitude" Rob? Cause 10 orders of magnitude 10^10.
Posted by: g(r)omgoru || 04/05/2016 16:01 Comments || Top||

#13  Mainstream Americans whom went through or grew up during the US-vs-USSR/Soviet Union Cold War will likely be most frightful of anything Nukulaar or Radiological - in reality BIOWAR would be the worst.
Posted by: JosephMendiola || 04/05/2016 21:06 Comments || Top||



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Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has dominated Mexico for six years.
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Two weeks of WOT
Tue 2016-04-05
  al-Nusra Top Dawg dies in Idlib airstrike
Mon 2016-04-04
  Strikes kill Qaeda spokesman, militants in Syria
Sun 2016-04-03
  Salah Abdeslam 'refused to blow himself up', says brother
Sat 2016-04-02
  Nigeria’s Boko Haram Releases New Video Denying Surrender
Fri 2016-04-01
  Kurd Arab alliance drives ISIS troops from oil rich area near Raqqa
Thu 2016-03-31
  Gitmo aumnus Mullah Zakir ends rifts with Mullah Akhtar Mansoor
Wed 2016-03-30
  Houthis claim Daesh emir titzup in Taiz, andhis little mufti, too!
Tue 2016-03-29
  Belgium charges three more people with 'terrorist activities'
Mon 2016-03-28
  Two Arrested in Mali over Ivory Coast Resort Attack
Sun 2016-03-27
  Belgium charges suspected Brussels airport bomber, two others
Sat 2016-03-26
  Islamic State second in command likely killed - U.S.
Fri 2016-03-25
  Brussels police nab terror suspect at tram stop; bomb squad dispatched
Thu 2016-03-24
  Paris attacks fugitive Laachraoui named as second Brussels airport bomber
Wed 2016-03-23
  Hamas stages military exercises to test Gaza readiness
Tue 2016-03-22
  IS attacks at Brussels airport, metro, at least 34 dead, 200 injured


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