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UAE’s High-Tech Toolkit for Mass Surveillance and Repression

Full access to the article requires subscription. Apart from what is already available , here are some more excerpts: “ The surveillance goes beyond keeping tabs on Islamist preachers and foreign workers. Because the government has majority holdings in telecoms operators Etisalat and Du (formerly the Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company), the security services are able to monitor all communications on their networks. The UAE buys the technology to do this from Western companies such as McAfee. Shires says it’s likely that ‘Abu Dhabi has passively collected the data and provided it to Washington’ as part of the ‘war on terror’. After 9/11, it was the Arab Spring that contributed the most to the government’s determination to monitor and repress those it considered ‘internal enemies’. ‘2011 was a turning point in security terms — a brutal one,’ one of the academics who had asked for anonymity recalled. Former US National Security Agency (NSA) officer Lori Stroud told Reuters tha
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Harry the Goody

Killed only 25. What a mediocrity! A medieval prince would have killed a much higher number of ‘baddies’. Wasted tax payers money by the MoD. The British Army had “trained me to ‘other’ them, and they had trained me well” "We'd been given a meta-narrative, which we now recalled: We were a Christian army, fighting a militia sympathetic to Muslims ," he writes. With his tour in Iraq prematurely over, Harry turned to the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol, particularly Southern Comfort and sambuca, to deal "with unsorted anger, and guilt about not being at war - not leading my lads". Harry recalls telling his commander that unless he was sent back to a conflict area, he would "have to quit the army". Harry recalls wanting to use an almost one-tonne bomb on his first attempted air strike on a suspected Taliban position, which even his American counterparts saw as too much, something he jokingly thought as "very un-American".
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US: Two Decades of Forever Wars

Using ‘imperial’ and avoiding imperialism and capitalism. America isn’t ‘back’. Here’s why Related “ About 42 percent of Americans are now either unaware of the fact that their country is still fighting wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa or think that the war on terror is over. Consider that for a moment. What does it mean to be fighting wars for a country in which a near majority of the population is unaware that you’re even doing so?” “I tell my son that people die in wars because so many of us turn our backs on what’s going on in the world we live in.” Andrea Mazzarino from Cost of War Project
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War

Have we all forgotten about the Iraq war? Related Blackwater's Erik Prince: Iraq, privatising wars, and Trump
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I  think it is a timid article. It doesn't use the term state terrorism to refer to the actions of the imperialist powers. Also, yes, "the public" is also responsible. The public could be responsible for a positive change as well as for perpetuationg atrocities and the status quo, if not through tacit support, it is through passivity, indifference, silence and acceptance.  The public votes for the same criminals in again and again. Is not that a responsibility? The public also votes for the same criminals to perpetuate crimes at home (plunder, privatisation, inequality, etc). Furthermore, the author has not cited "the roots of terrorism" in the plural. He is happy to mention only a couple of the roots. The roots of terrorism
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A reminder How U.S. and Saudi Backing of Al Qaeda Led to 9/11 (The Washington Post) Related How the US fuelled the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq
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