The Cult of EMP Crazy can’t let a week go by without getting into print.
Anything will do — stories in major newspapers and magazines, opinion pieces or long letters. Even when a journalist writes a weakly critical piece for something like Foreign Policy, as Sharon Weinberger did about a month ago (see here), the Cult uses it as an opportunity to thunder back with an article just as long.
So Foreign Policy lays out the red carpet for Peter Pry, one of the original floggers of electromagnetic pulse doom.
Pry is mad as hell and won’t abide it. “The Boogeyman Bomb” article wounds him deeply. And he goes through the usual arguments, delivering the claims of which the Cult has grown so fond.
Say such things often enough, or turn up the volume sufficiently, and that will do it. This works partly under the assumption that Americans judge the rightness of something by the number of people who can be convinced to chant it in unison.
“Weinberger accuses the EMP Commission of deliberately ‘exaggerating the capabilities of a potential EMP attack,'” complains Pry. “This is a serious allegation, as deliberately misrepresenting the facts about the EMP threat would constitute an ethical and legal violation.”
Perish forbid anyone would have done such a thing from the Cult of EMP Crazy.
Now let’s count the number of scripts Pry delivers.
One scenario of particular concern is a nuclear-armed Iran transferring a short- or medium-range nuclear missile to terrorist groups that could perform a ship-launched “anonymous” EMP attack against the United States. Iranian military strategists have written about EMP attacks against the United States, and Iran has successfully practiced launching a ballistic missile off a ship and flight-tested its Shahab-3 medium-range missile to detonate at high altitude, as if practicing an EMP attack.
The Bomb Iran script, beloved by the missile defense lobby, the Heritage Foundation, and anyone in the GOP far right who wants to, well, just bomb Iran.
There will always be individuals who disagree with any commission’s findings — no matter that the methodology, research, and analysis are excellent — just as there are those who disagree with the 9/11 Commission, the weapons-of-mass-destruction commission, the Warren Commission, or any other commission.
This is a uniquely new script, one exhibiting a bit of megalomania. It compares the EMP Commission, which few Americans have heard of or give a shit about, to the Warren Commission — set up to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the 9/11 Commission, which many, many, many Americans did know of and give shits about, for obvious reasons. So much so that books issued by both were best-sellers.
How’s that EMP Commission book doing, by the way?
Weinberger alleges that the EMP Commission and concern about the EMP threat is strictly partisan. But the EMP Commission’s bipartisan credentials are impeccable. It was established by a Republican-dominated Congress in 2001 and re-established by a Democrat-dominated Congress in 2006. Commissioners were appointed on a bipartisan basis. The EMP threat, and the necessity to do something about it, is one of the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans in Congress are working together.
The ‘bipartisan’ script. This one omits that the Cult of EMP Crazy has always been the exclusive property of the GOP far right. From ex-Congressman Curt Weldon, to EMP doom eminence grise Newt Gingrich, to hawk/birther Frank Gaffney, to birther Arizona Congressman Trent Franks, to Fox News star Mike Huckabee, to everyone at the Heritage Foundation ever, to the old white guys club listed down the side of the EMPAct America booster page here.
This only proves that Foreign Policy editors are weak, being unable to make Pry tell the entire story in favor of just the sole item that, yes, occasionally the Cult of EMP Crazy gets to appear before Congressional meetings attended by both Democrats and Republicans. And that sometimes Democrats make polite noises and nod their heads at these things.
As to Weinberger’s complaints that Newt Gingrich and others concerned about the EMP threat sometimes recommend to popular audiences the novel One Second After, which describes a hypothetical EMP attack on the United States: Since Uncle Tom’s Cabin there has been a venerable tradition in U.S. democracy of educating and building popular support for causes through novels.
Script which must mention William Forstchen’s not really famous novel. This time accompanied by implied comparison, in terms of importance, to famous novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. See megalomania reference, above.
An EMP attack is the only option for a single nuclear weapon that offers terrorists or rogue states any realistic chance of defeating the United States, perhaps eliminating the United States as an actor from the world stage, permanently.
The total destruction of American civilization script. In this case, not accompanied by the standard statistic of almost the entire population starving or passing away in the year following attack due to absence of basic amenities.
And here — right on time — another dose of stock Cult of EMP Crazy from Heritage Foundation central casting at Fox News Video.
Update:
A reader writes: “A (non-nuclear) EMP device was employed by terrorists at the end of this week’s episode of 24 — which no sensible person watches anymore.”
This marks the second time an EMP bomb was used in the series, at least. One was deployed in Los Angeles a couple seasons back.
Yup, everything was coming up roses for the good-until-proven-otherwise guys. That is, until Kayla unknowingly drove an electromagnetic pulse bomb into the office and short-circuited CTU. This looks like a job for Absurd-o-Meter.
In an only slightly related note, the 24 character, the snivelling Dana, could prove crippling to Katee Sackhoff’s career.
Sadly, Sackhoff has been in a number of roles ranging from dreadful to merely bummerish, including that of a publc sex-crazed anethesiologist in Nip/Tuck, since Battlestar Galactica.
Today, fresh from the predatory career-advice industry: Traits that will guarantee you that raise in the US corporate workplace.
1. Think for the Boss
Find out the key initiatives your company president wants to achieve.
If the president said in the annual report that he wants to increase profit by 15 percent at the health insurance company, focus on that goal. Your work needs to be connected with what the company cares about right now. So get to work writing computer software that will sift clients for penny-ante mistakes on their insurance papers, so they can be targeted for cancellation immediately when they get sick.
2. Be a highly visible lickspittle, not just a cubicle toady
If you stay cloistered in your cubicle, you’ll probably be disappointed when raises are announced — no matter how hard you work. To ensure that you and your hard work are seen, request projects that will get you in front of others — like dunning your colleagues for your boss’s favorite charity — United Way — instead of letting him do it.
This will make it easier for your boss to plead your case to any necessary approvers. “If a boss is in meeting and says, ‘I want to give a raise to Bloor, it’s going to be hard if no one knows who Bloor is. On the other hand, if Bloor has been visibly helpful in collecting monies or in the newspaper defending the company against allegations of fraud or criminal misconduct, they’ll say, ‘Oh Bloor, he’s terrific!'”
3. Be a charismatic apple-polisher
Being a suck up is terrific. But if you really want to go places, your suck-upitude must be infectious, capable of spreading its enthusiasms to your co-workers. Executive coach Lisa Blankfein-Pandit says this kind of interpersonal skill plays a huge role when compensation is discussed.
4. Be subtle
No boss will ever actually come out and say, “I love to give raises to ass-kissers.” So how do you draw attention to this quality without seeming like a finagling braggart? The president and CEO of the National Association of Professional Employer Organizations says that giving your boss a quarterly report on his or the company’s milestones — be it downsizing 100 employees without experiencing any theft or damage to office equipment or how the chief executive figured out how to put a lot less product in a box that looks lots bigger — and asking for feedback is a subtle way to get noticed.
5. Feel for the Boss
The highest-earning employees understand that their job is to make their boss’s life easier. Think about the things that your boss doesn’t like doing — well, just about everything except collecting his end of year bonus or meeting high rent hookers at the Serbian Crown Room or Ruth’s Steakhouse — and ask if you can help by taking over those tasks. It’s also important to understand that your boss can’t always give you what you want, no matter how great your efforts have been to uplift his days. “Most people get keyed up to ask for a raise and when they hear ‘no’ they respond really negatively,” says one career-adviser. “If you instead say, ‘I understand, but when wages are unfrozen, please sir, I would like to be the first in line, remember the many good happy hours you had at the Serbian Crown Room,’ you’ll have a much better chance of getting the raise when they can give it.”
There are fewer more poisonous articles than those which lash nabbed terrorists together in search of a trend or a growing problem.
“Recent cases show challengeds of US terrorists,” reads the latest, from Associated Press.
Reporters Eileen Sullivan and Devlin Barrett lash together a collection of designated bad people in the news and consults a variety of experts to read the future. The future, in these stories, being always rotten and getting worse. No context in terms of what problems the US faces by comparison, or the amount of miscellaneous mayhem that goes down every month on US streets, is furnished.
It reads:
One was a drywall contractor and father, another a petite woman who cared for the elderly, another a U.S. military officer. The most alarming thing about a string of recently arrested terror suspects is that they are all Americans.
And there’s the crazy guy who shot and wounded guards to the entrance of the Pentagon and the man who wandered around as a construction worker nobody at nuclear plants in the US and then went off to crawl the dunes of Yemen for years. The crazy kid is left out because he was not a Muslim. Same for the poor man’s Ted Kaczinski who flew his airplane into an IRS building. And the deadliest bioterrorist in history, against which individuals like Jihad Jane seem silly — Bruce Ivins — is also not here.
Just not the right religion.
And of the terrorists selected for this story, only the US Army-minted Nidal Hasan proved truly capable — killing thirteen.
One might venture to say the number still seems quite small in a country as diverse and vast as the US, particularly when considering the poor state of mind imposed on nearly everyone by current economic conditions.
” ‘These cases, [one counterterrorism expert] said, ‘underscore the constantly evolving nature of the threat we face,'” reads the AP piece.
Another way to look at it, logically, is to see that it’s a rather bad argument for endless war and increasingly oppressive snooping, vigilance and intolerance. And that next to everyday problems like rising unemployment, broken government, and the failure of the United States to effectively educate and lead as befits a country of its history and size, these are only small annoyances which — by their exaggeration — point to a self-imposed increasingly bleak future.
A drift into terrorism is “a combination of psychology, sociology and people who, just for cultural reasons, gravitate” [to Islamic extremism] … We can’t assume we’ve got months and years,” Michael Chertoff opines.
Chertoff can always be counted on to reliably deliver the noxious disguised as wisdom. Just last month he was part of a program which CNN ran repeatedly over the course of one weekend, a feature presentation selling the idea that cyberattacks will deliver the new WMDs.
Chertoff’s observation on US terrorists implies one ought to take up the very bad idea that we need to quickly develop the right amount of observation and surveillance, marked up against a scientifically approved list of social character markers, so that these troublesome people can be ferreted out sooner — before too many of them show up and the streets run red with blood.
I know there are more of them out there,” says someone named Jack Tomarchio, another former Dept. of Homeland Security employee.
In these stories the most toxic quote always seems to be delivered by the ubiquitous Bruce Hoffman, a “terrorism expert at Georgetown University.”
“The spate of cases over the past two years shows the conventional wisdom about who is a terrorist is dangerously outdated,” the AP says Hoffman informs.
“There really is no profile of a terror suspect; the profile is broken … It’s women as well as men, it’s lifelong Muslims as well as converts, it’s college students as well as jailbirds.”
These words work to create the impression that terrorism is sort of like a hard to diagnose disease or a trace poisonous gas, floating through the air, capable of infecting or tainting anyone at anytime depending on a panoply of inner weaknesses. And that the only way to stop it is to go to the source and deliver a regular prescription of root terrorism-killing antibiotic or antidote — the burning and stamping out of Muslims who look at the US with anger from other countries.
It is the most meretricious thing, a prescription for endless war, more threats to blow out of proportion next to more urgent problems diminishing the quality of life and blighting futures nationwide. Except for those in the business of explaining and countering terrorism.
The Univerity of Pittsburgh Medical Center has announced a new alliance for biosecurity, but without that old name.
This is after it was compelled to separate from the old ‘Alliance for Biosecurity’ last year because of the taint of cronyism which news articles attached to it, the Department of Homeland Security’s then incoming undersecretary for Science & Technology, Tara O’Toole and deceased congressman Jack Murtha.
Collectively, a reporter at the Weekly Standard dubbed this aggregation of bioterror defense enterprise and politics “the Murtha/O’Toole favor factory.”
Articles discussing it are at the Washington Times, the Standard and one on this blog are consecutively — here, here and here.
Separated from the Alliance for Biosecurity, the UPMC has continued to be be busy with other partners in order to secure more bioterror defense loot from the US government/taxpayer as a consequence of Bruce Ivins of Fort Detrick’s little stunt with anthrax.
At Armchair Generalist, Jason Sigger writes of the p.r. announcement as it was channeled through the Pittsburgh Business Journal:
Now that the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine dropped out of the “Alliance for Biosecurity,” its leadership must have been desperate to find another way to get to the cash cow of bioterrorism industry. And find one it did …
Battelle, IBM and Merck & Co. Inc. are partnering with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in the development of a first of its kind vaccine factory, the hospital network announced.
The new partners join GE Healthcare in pursuing construction of the facility, which UPMC wants to operate in partnership with the federal government as a way to respond quickly to chemical, biological or radiological threats such as a bioterrorist attack.
The plant would be funded by the federal government and operate as a nonprofit UPMC subsidiary
In the United States post-9/11, most people instinctively realize that when one declares that your goal is to build a ‘non-profit institution’, what you are actually doing is building a very much ‘for-profit institution.’
And profit there is to be made as one can tell from an eyeball of Tara O’Toole’s ethics and financial disclosure statements, on-line last year at Pro Publica and the Washington Post.
Readers will also notice that IBM, GE and Battelle are not names any reasonably informed people normally associate with improving general health, welfare and the practice of curing the sick in this country.
They are, however, big names with a lot of clout and significant lobbying power.
“[It’s] a funny thing, how non-profits like Battelle can be so aggressively driven by profit-chasing,” writes Sigger puckishly. “‘Battelle is investing today in key initiatives that will deliver a safer, healthier, and more productive tomorrow’. So was the Umbrella Corporation.”
Tsk-tsk, Mr. Sigger.
With the impression of cozy dealing attached to the UPMC Center for Biosecurity’s work with Jack Murtha (and, well, his subsequent untimely demise), another politician of influence had been sought and found in 2009.
D nee R Senator Arlen Specter was recruited into the role of UPMC bioterror defense/vaccine manufacturing facility enabler. As can be seen by his use of the thing as a job-builder in his campaign for re-election here.
The operation, it was said, would create “70,000 jobs.” Which is overselling it by quite a bit.
The UPMC Center would allegedly revolutionize vaccine manufacture by magic use of something called GE “disposable plastic technology”. This explains GE Healthcare’s involvement, “disposable plastic technology” being apparently its proprietary contribution to a promised great leap forward in vaccine production.
“UPMC worked on its proposal for a public-private partnership for several years, according to Rep. John Murtha’s office. Murtha, D-Johnstown, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, held hearings and consulted with UPMC on the need to increase [bioterrorism] vaccine capacity in the United States,” reported the Pittsburgh Tribune last year in an article telling about a Congressional hearing called by Specter to further push it down the rails.
“At a hearing Murtha called in Washington last year, officials testified a public-private partnership, possibly with an academic institution, could be a viable option that likely would cost several billion dollars.”
Alarmed by the potential reaction that an estimate of “several billion dollars” might cause in government, since it is the taxpayer’s money, the UPMC has subsequently revised its “estimate” downward to only one billion.
“Improving vaccine capacity probably will involve several public-private facilities in case contamination or a terrorist attack disables one …” one booster of the UPMC effort told the Pittsburgh newspaper.
This was a rather strange statement, as the one bioterrorist that the US has seen in recent years did not disable any bioterror defense installations.
Bruce Ivins, the most famous bioterrorist in the world, did not attack Fort Detrick with anthrax in the mail, a public private military taxpayer-funded facility which is central to biodefense research and preparedness. Ivins was a senior researcher at Fort Detrick, one who worked on the anthrax vaccine.
Anyway, in short: This announcement is just the latest news in the effort to more efficiently transfer taxpayer treasure to the biodefense research infrastructure.
Some very informed sources consider it a done deal.
However, it’s possible Arlen Specter could lose in his bid for re-election this November. With regards to this case, the election of Republican Pat Toomey could be a good thing as it would at least cause the UPMC to go to the trouble of enlisting a new government fixer.
Today, this in from Yahoo News on absurd potential changes in public school history textbooks for Texas. The reason being, as goes Texas, so everyone else must suffer equally.
A greater emphasis on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.??? This means not only increased favorable mentions of Schlafly, the founder of the antifeminist Eagle Forum, but also more discussion of the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association and Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America.
One would be hard-pressed to name one substantial thing the Heritage Foundation has contributed to the US.
Paul Revere’s? Uh-uh. Great inventors? No. Scientists? No. Great advancers and defenders of civil rights and the rule of law? No. Healers and philanthropists? No. Eradicators of smallpox? No. Discoverers of electricity? No. Great astronauts of our time or first makers of the electric guitar? No and no. Arms controllers and peace workers? No. House of Nobel laureates? No. Invented the Internet? Sadly, no. Heroes of bloody Tarawa or the Meuse-Argonne? No.
Haters of homosexuals. Yes. EMP Crazies? Yes. Despisers of Democrats? Yes. Upholders of old-right-wing-white-guys political club? Yes. Dumping ground and sounding board for out-of-power GOP pols? Yes. Bomb Iran lobby central. Check. Advocates of using lasers to battle pirates? Yes!
A reduced scope for Latino history and culture. A proposal to expand such material in recognition of Texas’ rapidly growing Hispanic population was defeated in last week’s meetings—provoking one board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out in protest. “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist,” she said of her conservative colleagues on the board. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
It’s a damn shame when the last and only way to learn about the intertwine of American and Mexican culture — like if you don’t live in California or Arizona — is through the record catalog of ZZ Top. I heard it, I heard it, I heard it on the X!
A more positive portrayal of Cold War anticommunism. Disgraced anticommunist crusader Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator censured by the Senate for his aggressive targeting of individual citizens and their civil liberties on the basis of their purported ties to the Communist Party, comes in for partial rehabilitation. The board recommends that textbooks refer to documents published since McCarthy’s death and the fall of the Soviet bloc that appear to show expansive Soviet designs to undermine the U.S. government.
Can we have a shout out for Roy Cohn, too, while you’re at it?
Language that qualifies the legacy of 1960s liberalism. Great Society programs such as Title IX—which provides for equal gender access to educational resources—and affirmative action, intended to remedy historic workplace discrimination against African-Americans, are said to have created adverse “unintended consequences??? in the curriculum’s preferred language.
Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin …
[The] recommendations include an entry listing Confederate General Stonewall Jackson as a role model for effective leadership, and a statement from Confederate President Jefferson Davis accompanying a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
A recommendation to include country and western music among the nation’s important cultural movements. The popular black genre of hip-hop is being dropped from the same list.
To DD this is more richly amusing than dismaying.
In education, we could get exactly what we’ve been working to deserve. If one believes in a God, he apparently has a very finely developed dry sense of humor.
Tech doomsday scenario No. 2: Wall Street gets e-bombed News flash: In what authorities suspect was the aftermath of an electromagnetic pulse weapon, a rogue attacker took down much of lower Manhattan today — causing equipment failures and power outages on a massive scale and shutting down financial markets across the country.
Though most commonly associated with nuclear explosions, you don’t need a nuke to create an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to do serious damage. EMP devices emit extremely high-frequency signals that fry electronics to a crisp, rendering them useless. An EMP will also wipe out or corrupt any data not stored on magnetic or optical devices. Worse, EMPs are largely untraceable, because the weapon itself destroys any evidence of its use.
A van with an EMP device in the back could effectively shut down big chunks of the U.S. economy simply by driving down Wall Street with the signal turned up, says Gale Nordling, CEO of Emprimus, a (US) company that helps enterprises protect against threats from non-nuclear EMP.
Nordling was last referenced on this blog as a guest at right-wing crazy radio here.
In the Nineties your host edited the electronic Crypt Newsletter. It was a publication that explored the world of computer virus writers and apocryphal wonder technology. It was sort of an anti-Wired, all e-mail and web postings, no glossy pages or advertising. And it new the subject of EMP Crazy well, even in those distant mists of the past.
Around 1998, the House Joint Economic Committee held a long series of hearings on the dread coming menace of electromagnetic pulse weapons.
At once a reader sees how long this sort of rubbish has been regularly bubbling and percolating.
Anyway, a good twelve years ago a retired Army general by the name of Robert L. Schweitzer testified before Congress on how an electromagnetic pulse ray could take down Wall Street. At one time he also made news for a sunken treasure hunt with John Singlaub off the Philippines.
A few years later, he died.
However, electromagnetic pulse rays still have not impinged upon Goldman Sachs, although we all might now wish it.
During the June [Congressional] hearing, Schweitzer made seemingly contradictory claims during the course of his presentation. At different times, Schweitzer claimed that electromagnetic pulse guns could be made for $800, that they could be made for $35, that they had been used against London banks although he was informed this was a hoax, and such weapons were now capable of disrupting Wall Street.
” . . . the cost is about $800 to do this,” Schweitzer said at one point.
As for knocking out Wall Street, Schweitzer later commented to Congressman Saxton, “[It] can be done with going to RadioShack and buying the components . . . And the prices are from $35 to $200 to buy components and do a number on Wall Street.” Schweitzer also alluded to, but did not mention by name, a generic hacker tech catalog that claimed to sell parts and schematics for such a weapon.
Further, Schweitzer testified that London banks were attacked by radio-frequency weapons, a myth that has been touched on in Crypt Newsletter.
“I was told that was a hoax,” Schweitzer said to Saxton. “. . . and it’s disputed in the Intel community and elsewhere but I think, frankly, and having gone into this in great detail, the dispute is to protect the fact it happened.”
Schweitzer added later: “I validated [this]. It isn’t just taking rumors or drivel off of the tabloids. These are solid facts that I’m giving you.”
These hearings were notorious for the amount of frank lies and trash delivered. While the web was still far too young for authorities to blame all Internet evil happening in the US on the Chinese, the Yellow Peril meme raised its head in another way.
At the time, the Chinese were said to be sending in sleeper agents to contaminate southern California public schools.
Why? To make our kids feel bad.
As an independent example, consider from the same sessions, other testimony — presented by author Dr. Peter Leitner on alleged Communist Chinese “yellow peril”-like subterfuge: “I’ve heard rumors . . . One I found particularly disturbing . . . [and] I haven’t seen any recorded documentation of these incidents . . . where very young-looking Chinese students were going to the United States and placed in high schools in the U.S. except their ages were 24 – 25 years old . . . They were brilliant students . . . Well, it turns out it’s an example of a sleeper agent, somebody who is put in position. He already has advanced degrees before coming in, then is put into the position as a seed and then is allowed to flourish in a totally unfair competition with U.S. student counterparts.”
Part of one new business strategy for making money from nothing is career advice.
At any one moment it’s easy to get the impression that half the on-line revenue in advertising now comes from either offering courses for retraining or the sale of job-hunting advice.
Nowhere is this more obvious than at my hosting provider.
Yahoo relentlessly bombards browsers with ads, columns and stories on getting a job.
For instance, the daily ‘apply for a training grant and go deep into debt to get a 2-year degree or you’ll never get a job’ pitch.
Call it working over another subprime crowd of suckers, a lure that promises reward, never to be adequately delivered, if only you’ll go deep into debt to get some kind of vocational training certificate at whatver for-profit little school is offering them in your area.
Or, there is the ‘The 10 best-paying jobs are … post.
And then the always favorite variation on what not to do during a job interview.
Typical advice, condensed: Scrupulously avoid being human and capable of error.
All of these work off the guilt-trip assumption that high unemployment in this country — more specifically, the reader’s lack of it — is the result of character and skill set faults in the job-seeker.
It’s hard to imagine a worse article or one more demoralizing than the link I’m going to post. How not to f— up an interview in 50 — that’s fifty — easily digestible bon mots.
Why only 50 Why not 100? Why not 200?
Doubtless fifty was probably thought to have the best chance at getting linkbacks and ‘most e-mailed’ status among the busy bees scavenging for jobs.
Remember, these advices and articles only work by leveraging desperation. Their ubiquity now guarantees they provide no service or common sense advice that people haven’t already considered.
They work for an industry that needs everyone to believe that American economic calamity is the fault of an inferior US worker.
DD has done the theme up previously here, here and here.
Don’t smell like a cigarette, it advises. Don’t fail to demonstrate the proper qualities of a lickspittle. Don’t smell like this or that. Don’t ask too many questions or talk too much but don’t appear mum. Don’t sit down wrong. Look at the boss but don’t look at the boss.
It’s here — furnished by someone named Karen Burns who knows how to make a job out of leveraging the joblessness of others.
“What and when MI5 knew about torture” is the headline of a story in the Guardian here.
The introduction reads:
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5 throughout most of the years of the so-called war on terror, insisted yesterday she had not known that Khalid Shiekh Mohammed was being waterboarded.
In a response to the appeal court’s judgment that MI5 officers had a “dubious record” on torture, she sought to blame the US and maintained that only after she retired in 2007 did she discover that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks had been waterboarded 160 times. “The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing,” she said. Critics, though, said it was stretching credulity to claim surprise.
However, British intelligence and anti-terrorism police regarded information extracted under torture as worthy of consideration, no matter the source or procedures used to extract it.
This pertained to the the infamous London ricin trial in which the government’s chief informant was an Algerian named Muhammad Meguerba.
However, as time went on, Meguerba’s material could not be brought as evidence. And this was said to be because it had been made in a confession extracted under torture while in Algeria, a confession that was later recanted.
A London jury eventually concluded there had been no UK poison ring, just one loner with wild plans — Kamel Bourgass, a very bad man who had been convicted in a previous trial of murdering a Manchester police office during his capture.
The Guardian piece continued:
Eliza Manningham-Buller spelt out her position in written evidence to the law lords in 2005: “In some cases, it may be apparent to the [security and intelligence] agencies that the intelligence has been obtained from individuals in detention … though even then the agencies will often not know the location of details of detention,” she said.
Though she added that detainees could “seek to mislead their questioners”, she said: “Experience proves that detainee reporting can be accurate and may enable lives to be saved.”
She referred in her statement to the “ricin trial” and the Algerian supergrass in the case, Muhammad Meguerba. “Questioning of Algerian liaison [security service] about their methods of questioning detainees would almost certainly have been rebuffed and at the same time would have damaged the relationship to the detriment of our ability to counter international terrorism,” Manningham-Buller said.
Lord Bingham, the senior law lord, said in the ruling that intelligence extracted by torture was not admissible in British courts: “I am not impressed by the argument based on the practical undesirability of upsetting foreign regimes which may resort to torture.”
Keystone Boys State will be held at Shippensburg State Teachers College in June. It’s still not too late to try and throw away a week of high summer learning to be a lickspittle, cheerleader and rule-follower at a small insignificant school in PA.
Every since a couple years ago, DD’s recollection of his week at Keystone Boys State way back in the day is still the only memoir of KBS life on the web. And it stubbornly remains a thorn in the side of Keystone Boys State here.
By comparison, KBSer’s attempts to offset this generous publicity fall by the wayside.
Here’s an excerpt from my recollections of Keystone Boys State life:
One of the objections to DD’s description of Keystone Boys State (ca. the early Seventies) was its nature as a camp administered by military men. Campers were herded, minded and ordered around by active duty members of the four services for the duration of a week in the summer even though it was ostensibly under the umbrella/direction of the Pennsylvania American Legion.
But perhaps the barking of orders, inspections and compulsory afternoon intramural sport have been packed away, relics of a much earlier era. However, in the early Seventies, it was a firm and strong part of the command structure.
Here is a video some stalwart Keystone Boys Stater has put on YouTube as counterpoint.
Young Pennsy men! Can’t you just see yourself this summer standing before some fattish guy doing military-style motivational calls and responses?
Yes? Well, heavens! Why are you still reading this blog?
Today, in from the wires on Satan’s favorite bank in Pasadena, OneWest:
Many borrowers complain they get the runaround when they call their lenders for help, receive contradictory information from different employees and are required to repeatedly fax the same documents.
At the same time, suicide threats from distressed borrowers are so common that one lender, OneWest Bank Group in Pasadena, Calif., had to establish procedures for alerting the police. Lenders’ call-center employees are under heavy pressure. “These people make $14 or $15 an hour, and we ask them to move mountains,” said a OneWest executive at an industry conference last month.
That’s so considerate. One can but be astonished at the great labor of the “lender’s call center” and pure milk of human kindness dispensed by OneWest.
From the Wall Street Journal inside a larger article on how another big menace, Bank of America, locked a woman out of her home unjustly and stole her pet parrot.
Now if Jihad Jane had been caught doing such things, the US government’d handle things a little differently, DD thinks.
A couple facing foreclosure from OneWest Bank has joined the growing number of homeowners, attorneys and real estate professionals who believe the bank would rather foreclose than modify a loan.
“It comes down to money and greed. All they want is your home,” said Tom Cravalho, who with his wife Mona has been working for nearly two years to get out of an adjustable rate mortgage.
The Cravalhos said their original lender, IndyMac Bank, agreed to a loan modification in the summer of 2008 that would have offered them a 3 percent interest rate for five years. But then IndyMac was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which sold the bank’s assets to a group of investors who formed OneWest Bank in March 2009.
Tom Cravalho said OneWest Bank has refused to honor the original agreement or discuss new terms. The Cravalhos’ attorney believes OneWest is more interested in reimbursement from the FDIC for the bad loan under a so-called “shared loss” agreement than it is in modifying the Cravalhos’ mortgage.
DD began writing on Satan’s favorite bank when the Huffington Post started its celebrity-run campaign to get people to move their money from big evil parasite banks to small community-oriented banks that allegedly care about their customers.
Just to keep current, I went back to Move Your Money to check if OneWest was still in the list of recommended allegedly not-evil banks.
Yep. No change. Large evil bank still in master list of allegedly small not evil banks.
“AlterNet writer Stephen Pizzo has a simple question for people still using a big bank,” states the Move Your Money blog fatuously. “Why? They’re bad for you, bad for the country, and everybody knows it.”
