IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/communications/logs/Gulf-War/desert-storm/

by cantbecool • 12 years ago

220 105 12 years ago

cmdrfred2• 12 years ago

<CaptainJ> THE LIBERATION OF KUAIT HAS BEGUN <Alexander> WAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <Goofa> The liberation of Kuwait has begun. <Anipa> Mr Fritzwalter: the liberation of Kuwait has begun <Tylenol> WAR HAS STARTED!!!! <Alexander> WAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

keehun• 12 years ago

  <MistDrake> Announcement from the president of US: The
  liberation of Kuwait has begun

  <Arkie> i'm listening to nbc radio....

  <Starhawk> "Desert Storm"

sheetjs• 12 years ago

    #Belladona# Bagdad Radio reports Saddam has ordered his 
       troops out of Kuwait IMMEDIATELY!
    #Scott# unconfirmed, keep it to +war/+report
    #alex# belladona - stop making rumors ....

rdl• 12 years ago

I wonder if the IRC logs from the Iraq War (round 2) will ever be declassified and released. IRC is used pretty extensively by the military for communications (generally just called "mIRC", since people associate it so strongly with the official military client), and there were a bunch of different channels on different networks to discuss operations in realtime.

http://publicintelligence.net/tactical-chat/

thefreeman• 12 years ago

FYI for some reason MalwareBytes treats that link as malicious.

maaku• 12 years ago

Military client? mIRC is shareware:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRC

malvim2• 12 years ago

I think he meant mIRC (the shareware software) is the official IRC client of the military.

msutherl• 12 years ago

<Lipstick> I dont think bagdahd is on the net =]

<BOY> No arab countrys on the net..

melloclello• 12 years ago

Archived SomethingAwful thread from 9/11/2001:

http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/

http://www.truegamer.net/SA_911/911%20SATHREAD/wtc01.html

WATCH BUSH START A FUCKING WAR

TeMPOraL7• 12 years ago

From the thread:

Now this is weird, since last week was the first showing of that X-files spin-off "The Lone Gunmen" in Austalia. The plot of the first one was that some government group was going to fly a plane into the World Trade Centre. Life imitates art?

Eee... WHAT? I always read that WTC was the kind of event that no one ever imagined it could possibly happen until after the incident.

shepardrtc• 12 years ago

Nope. For another example, see Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor

icegreentea• 12 years ago

Clearly they meant the general public thought it was outside the realm of things that would actually happen, as opposed to realistic seeming (yet safely 'impossible') things of fiction.

For example Tom Clancy's Debt of Honour wraps up with a Japanese airliner flying into the Capitol Building killing off the majority of the US Government.

gilgoomesh• 12 years ago

The scale of the September 11 attacks was greater than most predictions (given that no terrorist attack in history had ever been that destructive) but planes into buildings and terrorist attacks on the WTC were frequently predicted events.

The Empire State building has been hit multiple times by planes including a serious incident involving a B-25 in 1945:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-25_Empire_State_Building_cras...

and the WTC had been the subject of multiple previous bombings:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombing

Planes attacking buildings – especially the World Trade Center – is certainly something that had been imagined.

robbiep• 12 years ago

Except it had already been attempted by Bin Laden in 1993, albeit without planes

cperciva• 12 years ago

I always read that WTC was the kind of event that no one ever imagined it could possibly happen until after the incident.

There were two aspects to 9/11 which surprised people. First, that it was four planes which were hijacked: For security screeners to allow one armed hijacker onto a plane may be poor luck, but for armed hijackers to get onto four planes looks like carelessness. (With apologies to Oscar Wilde.)

Second, while the prospect of planes crashing into towers had been considered -- and in fact all modern skyscrapers are designed to survive such an impact -- the aftermath of 9/11 was the first time the prospect of aircraft fuel being used to bring down a skyscraper was ever widely contemplated. If the two planes which hit the WTC hadn't been carrying enough fuel to reach LAX, the fires would not have burned for long enough to bring the towers down.

ElliotRodger• 12 years ago

Operation Bojinka in the mid 1990s, involving Ramzi Yousef and KSM himself, was a similar plot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot

"The Path to 9/11" has a few historical inaccuracies but it provides a good dramatization of the key events in the 90s that led up to 9/11. It's well worth watching.

TeMPOraL7• 12 years ago

(writing this as a comment since I'm past the edit window for the previous one)

Thank you all for those references. I learned a lot today.

mikeash4• 12 years ago

The Japanese used suicide pilots in the 40s. The leap to airliners is not so big.

For something in the terrorism realm, check out Air France 8969. It was hijacked with the intent of using it to destroy the Eiffel tower (either by crashing into it or by blowing up the plane over it). It never happened because the French discovered the plan while the plane was on the ground and attacked it.

wmil2• 12 years ago

It aired in the US 6 months prior and 13 million people watched the episode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen_(TV_series)

The "no one ever imagined" line is put forward by DC insiders to cover for the fact that they never planned for a well known attack vector. Reporters spend a lifetime building connections to senior civil servants and have no problem running with lines like that if it will help their contacts keep their jobs.

TeMPOraL7• 12 years ago

Pro tip: increment the number in the second URL to see other pages of the discussion thread.

canjobear• 12 years ago

Page 13, Kramer says:

Not to belittle the signifigance of these events, but you do realize that this means a whole slew of "anti terrorist" and probably "anti violence" laws will be passed through congress.
Any "anti terrorist" laws will be given almost a blank check to do what is necessary. I'd be surprised if in 6 months you'll be able to make a domestic call without it being monitored.
That's the way terrorism works. It's not the attack that hurts most people. A couple of hundred people die -- every death is tragic, but the truth is the real tragedy will be the loss of freedoms for the survivors.

sinwave• 12 years ago

Yeah, this comment was massively insightful.

pistle• 12 years ago

This period was a text-book case of the use of fear as a tool to unwind the spirit of American freedoms.

Literally, from peoples' mouths, "Better to lose some freedoms than to be scared."

madaxe_again2• 12 years ago

Fascinating. I was in Dominica at the time. They threw a national street party for the day to celebrate "the big house falling down". I guess there's something of a grudge to be borne there, from hundreds of years of slavery.

Re: the thread, it's saddening quite how many were immediately desperate to go to war - with bin laden, nonetheless. This is generally a bit odd, given that OBL was only really known in the west for the Kenyan embassy bombings in 98 - and before that knocking off a German spook.

So, I guess my question is: Why we're folks so quick to choose OBL as the perp, even while every group on the planet was taking credit? Why this relatively unknown group who've done little in 3 years?

I suppose it's just odd that many seemed primed to have the same response, of "let's bomb Afghanistan".

randallsquared2• 12 years ago

Oddly enough, I was also in Dominica at the time. I don't remember hearing anything about that "national street party", but everyone I came in contact with immediately after 9/11 was incredibly kind and most seemed more emotionally affected than I myself felt.

kourt• 12 years ago

One reason is that the the USS Cole bombing occurred less than a year prior.

ilaksh2• 12 years ago

I'd like to see IRC logs from other countries at the same time.

As well as a map of all of the invasions and "liberations" with a timeline, and a list of official "reasons" for those military actions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_oil...

Hmm. I wonder what the IRC logs of the Venezuelan "liberation" will look like? Actually for Venezuelan's sake hopefully the economic warfare already going on, along with the encroachment coming from the direction of Brazil during World Cup, will be enough to "integrate" them into the system (i.e. "liberate" them of control over their resources) without requiring overt military action.

TeMPOraL7• 12 years ago

As well as a map of all of the invasions and "liberations" with a timeline, and a list of official "reasons" for those military actions.

I like that idea. It could be really interesting and educating to play with an interactive map showing that. There are things like that appearing from time to time (like the article about Syria and Iraq from yesterday[0]); I hope that concept trend will catch on and we'll see more and more old and modern history knowledge expressed in interactive, explorable forms.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7985305

ilaksh2• 12 years ago

I think it would be good to have a map and timeline like that going back to the 10th century. Because I think that people _really_ could use some perspective.

pjc50• 12 years ago

Large areas of WW2 were oil-related: North Africa, Indonesia, southern USSR (leading to Stalingrad), etc. I've not yet seen someone write the oil-orientated history of that war.

saryant2• 12 years ago

The Prize by Daniel Yergin devotes several chapters to the impact of oil in WW2, notably the destruction of the Shell complex at Balikpapan in the Pacific and Ike's decision to allocate fuel to Montgomery instead of Patton when stocks ran low, boosting Montgomery's march towards Antwerp but stopping Patton two days short of the Saar.

He covers everything from Japan's desire for the oil production of Indonesia to Germany's doomed synthetic fuel effort. The author also covers Nimitz's focus on denying oil resources to Japan, a strategy that eventually let him land several fatal blows to the Imperial Navy and end the war in the Pacific.

Nimitz was so successful in that strategy that near the end of the war, the Japanese began using kamikaze attacks against American naval vessels as a fuel-saving tactic, since pilots only required half as much fuel to complete their mission.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Prize-Quest-Money-Power/dp/1439110...

Houshalter2• 12 years ago

This is surprisingly interesting. I just picked a random log and found this:

   <Swan/+report> test to see if infoserver is echoing 
   messages to group +war.  well all this info is probably old.
     The iraqis caused an oil spill 8-10 miles long and a 
   couple miles wide.  It's 12 times the size of that caused 
   by the exxon valdeez.  It's not known if wells are actively 
   pumping into the gulf right now, or if they just dumped 
   stored reserves.  If they're pumping at max capacity, it'll 
   get bigger by a factor every 3 days.  in other words it 
   will be 13 times the size of the exxon valdeez in 3 days, 
   14 in 6, 15 in 9.  (I realize I said that wrong).  That's a 
   worst case.  It's not possible to overstate how concerned 
   Bush seemed by this.  I think he aged a few years last 
   night.  the spill is not military significant, but 
   ecologically its a nightmare of course.  There is some 
   concern about water problems, the oil might threaten 
   desalination plants.  Yesterday the weather was much better 
   over iraq, so they set a record for the # of sorties in a 
   single day.  2700 I think.  they launched 2 missiles at 
   saudi arabia today, and 7 at israel.  (scuds).  One hit in 
   israel, lightly wounding a bunch of people, killing 1.  1 
   person died in saudi.  Patriots knocked out a whole bunch 
   of them.  I just heard from Cheneys mouth that Bush has 
   something planned to deal with the oil spill.  --mcneil 
   lehrer

jdong4• 12 years ago

This message seems to be way too long for IRC.

edit: I really don't get why people are downvoting this, the message appears to have at least 1298 characters.

The_Pherocity2• 12 years ago

Explain please?

hyborg787• 12 years ago

consecutive lines from the same sender are collapsed into a single message, double spaces are where new lines should be.

thaumaturgy2• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill

An air strike was conducted against the pipeline that was the most significant contributor of the spill, however there were some other sources as well. It ended up being several times larger than the Valdez spill, a lot of it ended up on the beaches of Saudi Arabia, and it was never cleaned up, so it's still causing a lot of ecological damage.

I don't think I'd heard about this until now.

StavrosK• 12 years ago

Really? You never saw photos of all the oil-covered birds? I thought it was pretty well-known.

Also, it wasn't an air strike against the pipeline, it was the Iraqis dumping oil to prevent US marine landings (from what I heard, they were planning on setting it on fire if there were any ships there? Game-of-Thrones-style).

The air strike was to prevent further spillage:

On January 26, three US F-117 fighter-bombers destroyed pipelines to prevent further spillage into the Persian Gulf.

denom• 12 years ago

The success of the patriot missiles was a huge propaganda coup for the US. It turns out that the success rate of the missiles may have been as low as 10% or even zero: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Success_rate_vs...

SoftwareMaven• 12 years ago

I remember very clearly sitting in my first math class in my first term of college, talking about the Gulf War when it started. I was 18 at the time. The big concern we had was another Vietnam, dragging on for years with a new draft. There was a lot of talk on campus about that, until it became clear the war was not going to last long.

mikeash4• 12 years ago

Thank goodness we remedied that mistake in 2003.

gonzo• 12 years ago

Russia invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979. Carter re-instated draft registration the following June. I'd just turned 18, and thought Afghanistan or Iran (hostage crisis) would be my Vietnam.

Afforess• 12 years ago

Mirror zipped archive of all 39 IRC logs from the OP's link: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49805/desert-storm.7z

Asparagirl• 12 years ago

File #10 has an Israeli IRC user checking in moments after a SCUD missile hits:

  <Ran> Is there anybody there? I am fine. 
  Just got the damn gas mask off. Sorry

A minute later he/she reports that Tel Aviv was hit, source being "my ears".

IRC, beating the TV networks since at least 1991...

xelfer2• 12 years ago

I miss how massive IRC used to be. I've been on the same network since 1996. We're now at around 350 users down from the 6-8k we used to have back then. I've tried other networks and they all seem dead all the time.

imdsm• 12 years ago

I've been on Freenode for almost 10 years now (9 years, 48 weeks, 4 days, 18:19:12 ago), it's the only network which doesn't seem to be shrinking, though most of my old friends are gone now.

Pacabel• 12 years ago

A lot of the decline was due to people being driven away, directly or indirectly, by tyrannical ops.

A given channel, or even entire networks, would often start out pretty free. Dissenting discussion and arguments were allowed, if not encouraged. Users could hold and share their own beliefs without fear of repercussion. It was generally a fun experience. The channel or network would see growth.

But as the community became larger and more established, certain users would often end up becoming ops, and they'd start to enforce their own beliefs upon the entire community. People would start getting kicked or banned unnecessarily for very minor "violations", which most often involved just holding a different opinion than an op.

These kicked or banned users wouldn't come back, those users who liked them would have less incentive to return, and eventually there'd be more people getting booted or leaving than there would be new people coming and returning. The channel withers. If this happens with enough channels, the network withers. As networks wither, IRC itself withers.

FranOntanaya• 12 years ago

Freenode is still plenty active, specially for FOSS.

Even Reddit opened just a couple years ago their own server @ irc.snoonet.org.

Coding chatbots for IRC is still a really fun way to practice NLP concepts.

dingaling• 12 years ago

Ironically much of the damage to Tel Aviv and Haifa was not the direct result of Scud impacts but debris and explosives from Patriot SAMs launched against them.

39 Scuds were fired, 17 were engaged by Patriots and three were confirmed intercepted. I can't find the figure of how many Patriots were actually launched.

The number of Patriots that struck the ground intact after failed launches / failed interceptions remains classified but is greater than four. Most of the rest self-destructed in flight.

MrBuddyCasino• 12 years ago

The Patriot was so overhyped and yet so bad in practice that Israel went and developed its own missile interceptor system (Iron Dome), because they realized that from the claimed 80+ % success rate, Patriots really intercepted less than 10%.

And yet they still successfully sell this system to many countries.

pling2• 12 years ago

IRC has always been wonderful in times of trouble. I'm really surprised that people have abandoned it over the last decade.

I had to hit IRC when Sept 11th went down because I was stuck in a facility with no television reception and even news sites were down due to load. The only things that were still shifting data were slashdot and a couple of IRC networks. We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio worldwide including from ham and shortwave.

sentenza• 12 years ago

That was truly a moment in the spotlight for Slashdot. It's just sad that it has mostly died due to continued neglect.

icpmacdo• 12 years ago

I wonder if there will be a service that hits the sweet spot of cool community instant messaging over a large group of people in the next generation of technology, I think so.

pling2• 12 years ago

Well Twitter is where everyone goes now when something is broken. I'm not sure its the right solution but it's part of the way there.

mjhagen• 12 years ago

So many reports of other airplanes going missing on IRC that morning/day. Where were you on 9/11? “On IRC.”

sampo• 12 years ago

We had a channel relaying news from TV and radio

There was similar activity on IRC right after the 2013 Boston bombings.

mineo• 12 years ago

The website doesn't seem to work reliably at the moment, here's the archive.org version: https://web.archive.org/web/20131021002154/http://www.ibibli...

tottenhm• 12 years ago

Went to watch the July 4 fireworks in SF tonight, but it was cloudy, causing the fireworks to soften into a vague burst of color. I thought, "This looks just like CNN's coverage of the Gulf War. Except without all the fear and death. Damn, I'm lucky -- no war here!"

nikanj• 12 years ago

The rest of the world would prefer the US to have its wars on its own soil though.

ganessh• 12 years ago

No access

pantalaimon• 12 years ago

Can we please make #hackernews on freenode a thing again?

wmil2• 12 years ago

Who would go there? It'd be hacker news without the news (articles).

Kiro• 12 years ago

What's the context?

IRC logs from the beginning of the Gulf War (1991)

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