>The FBI asked the AP not to disclose the names of the fake companies it uncovered, saying that would saddle taxpayers with the expense of creating new cover companies to shield the government’s involvement, and could endanger the planes and integrity of the surveillance missions. The AP declined the FBI’s request because the companies’ names – as well as common addresses linked to the Justice Department – are listed on public documents and in government databases.
Gumption will be when they write the follow up article and print the names of the new she'll companies and continue to expose this disgusting behaviour.
That is slightly different but similar. I am expecting a sovereign country's citizens to do something like that, as far as I know that did not happen yet.
Demand an upper limit on total government spending as a % of GDP + upper limit for marginal tax rates for all individuals. Given the popularity of welfare very likely government will be forced to bring sense into its spending.
That is the only way. Other way is to use your second amendment rights.
No they will cut benefits starting with single people just like the UK where you don't get any of this feather bedding of 99 week social security. 180 days is your lot - oh and you had better be spending 40 hours a week applying for jobs and be abele to prove it or that gets stopped
What happens if you want government to spend money on things in general (infrastructure, healthcare, national and international aid in case of disasters, reasonable defense projects), just not on spying on civilians?
As I said put an upper limit, I did not say do away with government spending. Let the government manage in that much money by spending more judiciously then sucking our hard earned wealth. They can start for example by selling off the luxurious homes that our Congressman end up having for free.
For any other cause let people contribute out of their own volition.Which works much better.
I am dismayed, nay, infuriated that we waste taxpayer dollars in such a manner when the returns have been found to be non-existent. Yet, I read about atrocities committed every day by ISIS and the US government sits back and does little.
This is not the world I want to live in, and I have no idea how to solve these non-technical problems.
EDIT: Regarding downvotes and the replies as of 1433272217:
If ISIS wants us to engage them, we just sit back and allow them to rape whole villages and sell women into the sex trade?
You don't go to war for oil. You go to war for human rights and to prevent the slaughter and abuse of innocent people.
>If ISIS wants us to engage them, we just sit back and allow them to rape whole villages and sell women into the sex trade?
ISIS are an insignificant mock army of goat herders with guns. They could be eradicated in an afternoon. It's presense though helps with strategic goals of instability for the region.
>You don't go to war for oil. You go to war for human rights and to prevent the slaughter and abuse of innocent people.
That has never happened in the history of modern war. It was all about strategic interests, political influence and resource grabbing.
Heck, if anything lots of dictators have been put to place and pampered, allowed to "rape whole villages" and kill innocent people, by the same people pretending to care for "human rights" in other instances. From Mossadeq to being in bed with Shaddam, the Taliban, Pinochet, Saudi Arabia, El Salvador "death squads", etc. And then bringing even more death and chaos when those deals went out of favor or allies changed.
Besides that's the role of cops. Who appointed any country world cop? Should third countries had invaded the US to end "slavery", seggregation, the "police state" killing blacks etc?
> It was all about strategic interests, political influence and resource grabbing.
This is true, if you omit the 'all'.
> That has never happened in the history of modern war.
This is not true.
A state may go to war for both human rights and self-interests; these are not always contradictory. One casus belli does not preclude others, and it is better that a state have more than one reason to go to war. It might be rare for there to be a war that is actually fought for humanitarian means, but I would argue than one modern example is the Cambodian-Vietnamese War [0]. A Cynic might say that this war was for solidifying Vietnam's influence in the region, and the international reaction was to view the war as such, but perhaps there was a hint of sincerity in the Vietnamese propaganda claiming one reason for the war was to stop Khmer Rouge's domestic terror.
It's all about Realpolitik. Can't really get around that. With regards to slavery, it was rampant all over the world. On paper some had begun to illegalize it, but the only ones not practicing slavery in one form or other didn't because they couldn't (it was unprofitable) To this day we have what is essentially roman style slavery in ME counties. Few bat an eye at the official policies.
> Besides that's the role of cops. Who appointed any country world cop? Should third countries had invaded the US to end "slavery", seggregation, the "police state" killing blacks etc?
You don't appoint someone to do the right thing. The US civil war was large enough that it was tantamount to another country (the North) overthrowing the South to end slavery.
The Southern states (at least the initial ones) seceded over slavery, yes. The war, however, was over the states' right to secede (and the adverse impact of the secession on the country as a whole — particularly economically) far more than it was slavery, itself.
Its being about slavery was just the story offered to the polity in order to sell them on having a war at all.
> Its being about slavery was just the story offered to the polity in order to sell them on a having war at all.
The Union never claimed the war was about slavery (which would have been counterproductive, since the North contained slave states), but instead consistently said the war was about preserving the Union.
So, no, it wasn't a story offered to the polity to sell them on having a war. Because it wasn't the story offered to the polity at all.
Every grade school class I've heard of has taught that Lincoln was elected on a platform of preserving the union, that the South seceded over slavery, that the north -- including slave states -- fought to preserve the union, and that ending slavery was an effect of, not the motive for, the war.
"Doing something" about IS is exactly what they (the leadership of IS) want. They want the West — and particularly the US — to engage militarily with them, to give credence to their particular, perverse brand of apocalyptic Islam.
Letting them continue to alienate themselves amongst all the other Muslims on the planet by the way they treat their fellows (if you're Muslim, but don't believe in IS's specific notions of the caliphate, you're an apostate, and must be killed) will, in the long run, do more to destroy them than even nuking all of Syria ever could.
EDIT: re your edit: if the West engages militarily with IS, that becomes an even bigger recruiting tool for them than did the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine how many villages will be raped and killed and sold into sex slavery when IS has three times as many crazy fucknuts who all believe their heinous idiocy?
So, yes, by all means. Let's just go ahead and print their recruiting posters too, while we're at it.
Don't mistake me. I think IS and what they're doing are heinous and disgusting. But to react to what they're doing and try to stop them with force of arms will be massively counter-productive. Sometimes, blowing shit up just makes it worse. I mean, IS wouldn't even be a thing if the US hadn't blown up Iraq. How, exactly, is doubling down a good idea, again?
In the days immediately after 9/11, I said in an online forum to some friends that I really didn't want the US to spend the next several decades playing Whack-a-Mole with the jihad-inclined parts of Islam. Guess what we've done, and what you seem to be calling for doing...
> Letting them continue to alienate themselves amongst all the other Muslims on the planet by the way they treat their fellows (if you're Muslim, but don't believe in IS's specific notions of the caliphate, you're an apostate, and must be killed) will, in the long run, do more to destroy them than even nuking all of Syria ever could.
"Amid all the atrocities carried out by Isis — its massacres of civilians, its beheading of hostages, its pillaging of antiquities — the systematic violence the jihadists have carried out against countless enslaved women and girls never fails to shock. For months now, we've heard appalling testimony from women who escaped Isis's clutches, many of whom endured rape and other hideous acts of violence."
"Here's a chilling excerpt: "After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold."
"We heard about one girl who was traded 22 times, and another, who had escaped, told us that the sheikh who had captured her wrote his name on the back of her hand to show that she was his 'property'."
"Estimates vary, but there are believed to be somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 women enslaved by the Islamic State. Many are Yazidis, a persecuted minority sect that the extremist Islamic State considers to be apostate "devil-worshippers," in part because of the Yazidis' ancient connection to the region's pre-Islamic past. The jihadists' treatment of Yazidi women, in particular, has been marked out by its contempt and savagery."
Here's Bangura again: "They commit rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and other acts of extreme brutality. We heard one case of a 20-year-old girl who was burned alive because she refused to perform an extreme sex act. We learned of many other sadistic sexual acts. We struggled to understand the mentality of people who commit such crimes."
The last time we "had to" intervene in the Middle East because "waiting it out is not an option", we generated the conditions giving rise to the Islamic State.
Perhaps we need to consider more than whether there is something we don't like going on in the region, but also whether we have a the capability to actually execute something that has net positive result, when considering the social/political impacts of our involvement, including the reactions of people in the region to the US specifically acting in the region, given our historical and current involvement with regional actors.
Everytime the US acts in the region, it promotes, rather than reduces, anti-western Islamic extremism. There's lots of obvious and subtle reasons for that (the least subtle being the convenient propaganda magnet for extremist groups that our involvement with Israel, combined with the Israel/Palestine conflict, combined with pretty much any of the inevitable accidents of war -- and even worse, any actual abuses by US troops, whether as policy or by rogue bad actors -- provide.)
>The last time we "had to" intervene in the Middle East because "waiting it out is not an option", we generated the conditions giving rise to the Islamic State.
America did not intervene militarily in Syria (covertly, perhaps, but not militarily) yet Syria managed to fall apart. Similar to Syria, Iraq was an autocracy/oligarchy in which a religious minority ruled over a religious majority with pretenses of secularism. If these conditions were sufficient for the destabilization of Syria, it seems to me unclear whether the conditions for destabilization of Iraq were introduced with American invasion or were simply dormant.
Yes we did. Friends in a foreign military said there were plenty of American SF on the ground helping out. Otherwise the insurgency wouldn't have lasted a single month.
This is where I am torn. The short term is horrific, but by engaging militarily it seems that we ensure that we have the same problems in the future.
How do we break the cycle? How can we use the resources and technology at our disposal to protect the innocent, without adding more fuel to the fire?
An open ended question. I'm not sure what the answer is. We look at it in terms of "non violent intervention" vs "military operation" and I can't help but wonder what options in the middle we are leaving out due to the myopic nature of our society.
>"Here's a chilling excerpt: "After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness."
So, like what Australians did to their indigenous population right until the 70's for example:
>The Stolen Generations (also known as Stolen children) were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals occurred in the period between approximately 1909 and 1969, although in some places children were still being taken until the 1970s.
The children were placed in concentration camps, forced into servitude for white families, and often raped.
>The report said that among the 502 inquiry witnesses, 17% of female witnesses and 7.7% of male witnesses reported experiencing a sexual assault while in an institution, at work, or with a foster or adoptive family.
The main idea was to "white out" their population (sometimes decorated with some racist BS about protecting the children from their savage parents that were unfit to parent them etc, but other times spelled out clearly).
Or how about what the current "allies", and highly sophisticated people, the Germans did, less than a century ago, to several million jews, gays, gypsies and commies...
Or how about the ever popular torture, rape, sexual assalts etc. perpetuated by armies wherever they ventured to bring "democracy" to (it's not like the pictures from that prison in Iraq were that far back).
I'm giving those examples to put what's happening there in some perspective, because some people just see "them, uncivilized subhumans" and "us, sophisticated democrats", whereas it's more like the pot calling the kettle black, with the exception that the pot has better PR and pisses far away from where he lives, so the stink doesn't come as easily...
>I'm not quite sure how, because atrocities previously have been committed, its acceptable to allow them to be committed now.
The problem is they haven't just "previously been committed" they are constantly being commited by people who pretend to have the "moral high ground".
Even on a much larger scale than ISIS.
So it helps to
a) highlight the hypocrisy, b) highlight the unsuitability and inner motives of self-proclaimed saviors, c) bring to the front additional atrocities that need to be aknowledged and stopped.
If there's a serial killer in your town that's killed 300 people, it's not actually optimal to mobilize the whole town to go catch a gang that killed 2 people in a nearby village.
Especially if your actual target is to get some access to some nice beach-front property in the nearby village, so you could not give less fucks about the effectiveness of your methods or what happens after your involvement. (E.g. civil war, chaos, and hellish instabililty in what were more of less stable societies for decades).
Case in point: who destroyed Iraq's stability and helped ISIS take over in the first place?
Only if that's a thing they're capable of doing in the first place. Which, to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure they are. It seems like any time the US military gets involved in something nowadays, the surrounding people end up worse off than when they started.
If "nowadays" means "over the last fifty years" then I agree. Amazingly enough, this seems to correspond with the time period over which the military-industrial complex has held a monopoly over the civic and political discourse in USA. I wonder, could we be killing people primarily to support the armaments industry?
Going by the USA's history of waging wars against Islamic terrorism I think the track record is very poor. USA has lost a lot of money and has made situations only worse. There is no point saving some child in Iraq by taxing an American
Glad to see AP still has gumption.