The absurd nature of yesterday’s terror warning news about surgically implanted bombs led me to think there must be at least one unit in the US threat assessment apparatus that spends its time thinking of such things.
Have they come up with the dead body bomb?
Here’s how it would work.
Al Qaeda rounds up all the enthusiastic young boys that have come from America or Pakistan to Yemen. All twenty of them.
Now, here’s where the planning gets tricky. They boys have to keep in touch with their parents at home, not letting on what they’re really into.
After the parents are truly upset and in a frenzy to get the offspring home, al Qaeda sacrifices them to the dead body bomb office.
They’re killed and a bomb is sewn into the corpse in hope the parents will do anything to get the body back into America for the family plot.
You see where this is going. The operation then follows the general procedure of the failed toner cartridge bomb plot, getting the package onto a transport, to be detonated at some time in flight.
DD is sure this has been considered by our threat analysis centers.
Again, this only underscores the problem the terror agency has in recruiting effective jihadis after a decade of attrition.
This video illustrates the severe problem facing al Qaeda.
It’s Adam Gadahn’s exhortation to buy firearms at gun shows. Which worried some people.
However, Gadahn is inarguably lame looking and in delivery, scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, a terrible example for recruitment.
At a time when you can see Muslims rising up in the street all through the Middle East, people who look a lot more savvy than Gadahn, this was another of al Qaeda’s terrible ideas momentarily dressed up as something to worry about by the mainstream media.
And, as you can see, the video has been turned into a joke — a sales pitch for a book called “Jihad Joe.”
This is not to say that al Qaeda can’t recruit at all, anymore. It’s just that the time when a Mohammed Atta walked into the local office is long gone.
So what other desperation bombs are there to devise?
We continue with our quality programming in a moment. Nearing the end. But there’s still time to earn undying gratitude.
DD blog needs your help. I’m not too proud to beg.
The economic crash of 2008 has been as hard here as everywhere else.
Since stepping into cyberspace in the early Nineties everything written has been provided largely pro bono. And this is the first fundraiser of any kind that I’ve held.
Originally, I went under the rubric of the old electronic Crypt Newsletter, an e-zine devoted to hacker culture, specifically that centered on the worldwide network of young computer virus-writers.
Much of the work published through it was aimed at increasing public understanding of issues in cybersecurity and the hype-laden subjects of cyberterrorism and cyberwar. That continues to this day.
In 1994 some of the earliest published content was used in The Virus Creation Labs, a book on the old computer virus underground published by American Eagle. Interesting side fact: While the book is now technically out of print, the publisher decamped to Central America before 2000, convinced the country would overturn or that hyperinflation would come about as the result of the Millennium Bug.
By 2004 I had moved to a slightly different place at GlobalSecurity.Org, still doing pro bono public research on various security topics.
This work moved into the domain of poison recipes, specifically those for ricin and alleged home-made chemical and biological weapons, which had originated in the American survivalist extremist fringe during the Eighties. By the Nineties these tracts had been migrated to the Internet and simultaneously translated into Arabic.
In terms of practical things, this was one of the first places you could see at least one of the claims made by the US government, delivered by Colin Powell in his address to the UN Security Council, on reasons for war in Iraq, shot to pieces.
The London ricin ring as a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had been part of Powell’s presentation and the material published at Globalsecurity destroyed it.
At the time, the US news media largely ignored this but the work could not be erased. History had its way. (Examples of the news on the ricin trial in the US news media are here, at the Washington Post; and from Newsweek.)
Around 2006, the public work was formally moved to Dick Destiny blog.
Material published through here pushed back against mainstream and government claims that al Qaeda had capability in biological chemical weapons and that documents found on the Internet conferred equal capabilities to any jihadis interested in them.
While unpublicized that effort has been a success.
With the help of others the official public position was modified. One example was the grudging concession in the 2008 report from the US Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism: “We accept the validity of intelligence estimates about the current rudimentary nature of terrorist capabilities in the area of biological weapons … ” (Page 39.) Those intelligence estimates were not furnished by the US government’s analytical apparatus. They came from the work of outsiders, from here and analysis provided by colleagues.
Other proof is the anecdotal evidence that mainstream news is no longer littered with scare pieces insisting that al Qaeda men in some broken down hideout can make WMDs because of global access to terror capabilities granted by the Internet. Still, occasionally I have to issue burn notices on retired CIA men who resist getting the message. One example of such, from last year, is here.
Not bad for a blog.
Since then regular readers know I’ve kept up the fight while expanding into system domestic problems of economy and inequality which threaten the nation’s security in ways foreign threats during the war on terror never could.
This short history touches upon why the work has mattered. And so I ask for your help in keeping it moving forward and vital. Please help spread the word.
Donations are taken through PayPal. And you can still contribute without a designated PayPal account. Just page down to “Don’t have a PayPal account?” and click “continue.”
Big joke! Move your music to the Google cloud! For fuck’s sake, why? It’s already all there. YouTube would collapse if it weren’t for all the pirated old albums on it.
And here are two cuts from Bill Cosby’s 1967 music album, the much lauded by me, Hooray for the Salvation Army Band.
Good news, lads! Good news! There’s a a Barry White spoof, too: “Yes Yes Yes.”
You’d never know this stuff without me. Life would be even more grim than usual.
U.S. authorities have warned their counterparts abroad as well as air carriers about … new information and were taking steps to boost security.
“The Department of Homeland Security has identified a potential threat from terrorists who may be considering surgically implanting explosives or explosive components in humans to conduct terrorist attacks,” the advisory to foreign counterparts said, according to the U.S. security official.
Such a threat is likely to come from overseas rather than domestically, but precautions were being taken on both sides, the official said on condition of anonymity.
I wrote of this back in 2009, at the time of the failed underwear bombing plot, as being the next thing people would get worked up over.
Even then it was old. A New York newspaper — not the Times — had made a big joke out of stories about an alleged al Qaeda “butt bomber” who supposedly carried a bomb in his rectum
This turned out to be untrue. A discussion of the matter ishere.
The problem that’s easy to grasp with surgically implanted bombs is one of disability. It was even seen in the Batman movie, you know — where the henchman behind bars was doubled over in pain.
It’s real hard, almost impossible, to carry toxic chemicals — which is what explosives are — in your body. For any length of time. Without giving yourself away, being rendered immobile, or dieing.
Can you imagine all the al Qaeda volunteers lining up, now that bin Laden’s dead, to test what kind of packaging and surgical implantation will work best for these kinds of things? In Yemen.
Me neither.
Al Qaeda is demonstrably an enfeebled organization after ten years of being leaned on by the US security apparatus. And it has a real problem in finding capable operatives. Which is why its underwear bomber failed. And why it went to failed bombs placed in printer cartridges.
It’s a question of reliability.
When you can’t find anyone capable to carry out plots with reasonable chance of success, you think about taking the human element out of the equation. And when even that fails, you go to … whatever.
Realistically, it’s hard to know exactly where this warning came from. Is it actually based on reasonable intelligence?
That would seem not to be so — if one uses any common sense.
Did it come from some out-of-control threat assessment unit within the US government, one casting around for something to warn about now that bin Laden is dead?
That would seem more likely than the former, although it is not a given either.
In any case, I’d bet against seeing anything come of this in the near future. With only a slight chance that some young man from Pakistan or Yemen, very mentally ill or extremely crippled in some way, being netted at a checkpoint with a failed bomb wedged into him in some very painfully odd way.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, long a force in expanding government funding for bioterror defense, has shockingly seen plans for a bioterror vaccine facility collapse. “But there is no joy in Mudville; mighty Casey has struck out,” as the poem goes.
UPMC is halting its plans to build a vaccine factory in Hazelwood, a hospital spokeswoman said this morning.
The long-proposed factory, high-profile project was expected to produce vaccines to counter biological warfare agents such as smallpox.
UPMC officials said their strategy differs from that of the federal government, which would have paid for about half the project. The government wants to save money by using an existing commercial facility that also could be used for production of non-commercial products, said Robert Cindrich, a senior advisor to UPMC President Jeff Romoff …
“Unfortunately, the request for proposals recently released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cannot be reconciled with the approach and would greatly increase the risks for UPMC.”
Cindrich said the government’s request includes no guaranteed orders.
This is the project that Tara O’Toole, formerly of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity and now at the Dept. of Homeland Security, tried to build. And a couple years ago it looked like a done deal.
In the past, I’ve been critical of the bioterror industry engine represented by the UPMC Center for Biosecurity and Tara O’Toole. (The Bioterrorism tab contains much, if you dig down. For synopses, one can look here, and here and here and here.)
This is good news. Funding UPMC for more bioterror defense, even dressed up as a vaccine manufacturing facility, was always a bad idea. The jobs created would be minimal in the national picture. UPMC estimated 1,000 but that is surely an exaggeration.
Cutting the money by transference to an already established facility puts a crimp in some bioterror defense industry plans.
“DHHS is still going forward with its two billion-dollar vaccine facilities and DOD has its billion dollar vaccine facility still in the works. Breaking ground next year, if they can get the contract vehicles in place before the next year’s Republicans stop the budget process through a continuing resolution authority. So some other Big Pharma firm will get the action. The waste goes on.”
Today, a good professor writes on what everyone knows concerning where all the jobs and fortunes went. And the connection with the psychotic behavior of the Republican Party.
One of the takeaways, in the meta part, is that when all the perfessers (part of the class that’s professionally insulated against these misfortunes) are finally writing opinion pieces, some of them must be getting scared a bit concerned that irreparable harm has been done. And that, someday, it will affect even them.
The economy gained only 2.6 million jobs [during the Bush administration]. In fact, Bush’s job creation record in his first term was among the worst since Herbert Hoover’s.
And the numbers are even worse than they appear, because many of those jobs were produced by increased military spending related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan …
[By] 2003, more American money was being invested overseas than in the United States. In other words, those [GOP] tax cuts did help create jobs – in China, India, Brazil, and other foreign countries, but not in the United States.
Tax cuts create jobs! But clearly, in the last decade, they haven’t – unless you’re looking for work in China.
The juxtaposition of three graphs, which I’ve done before, illustrate it.
One — the expansion of the trade deficit with China, caused by the cessation of almost all domestic non-military production.
Two — the explosion in arms manufacturing.
Three — the burst in hiring by homeland security. And nobody else.
Ballistic ascension of trade deficit with China matching reality of all goods in stores providing materials for the middle class containing nothing but products from that country.
Yeah, I know, how boring. One of the conclusions I’ve drawn from the data is that the present-day GOP, in its fealty to big corporate money and plutocracy, is a great threat to the security of the country. It’s not an ideological thing. It’s simply backed up by the numbers.
Another thought: How did the country turn into a place where it statistically looks like, if there was a remake of the story of Robin Hood, everyone who makes the decisions would be standing in line for autographs from the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne?
Minor satisfaction over the weekend that Tom Hanks’ movie, Larry Crowne, on his character being fired and sent to retraining camp community college in LA, as a heartwarming reflection of the life in our times, is a major flop.
Yeah, that’s how everyone feels its going to turn out, Tom. They’ll get to ride around on nifty scooters and get the beautiful smart woman in the end.
Raw number of hits Google News returns for the mark of obsession with retraining camp as a cure: 2,065
Sampling:
“The AMERICA Works Act would allow community colleges to offer certification through the Manufacturing Skills Certification System …” — Burlington News
“Manufacturing jobs are a big source of economic growth in the Shenandoah Valley, and at Blue Ridge Community College, people can train …” — some radio station transcript
“And graduates will know that the community college diploma they earn ‘will be valuable when you hit the job market,’ he added. The White House also proposed a program to train 10000 engineering students a year …” — Fortune
“[Community] College will train chefs at New Mount Holly Center …” — the Philly Inquirer
Between bedpan technicians and chefs, we’ll guarantee the future.
“Train to be a master gardener at Spartanburg Community College” — Spartanburg Journal
Casino sees [community college] as work incubator … The company says it has had discussions with at least three central Ohio schools, including Columbus State Community College, to create several programs to train workers for the $400 million casino.” — Columbus Dispatch
You have to be trained to work at a casino? What, how to mix drinks, deal cards, polish slot machines and deal with people who need escorting from the premises?
“Warren County Community College to train [bedpan technicians]/hospice workers …” — Warren County newspaper
Push it toward 2,000 views, folks.
The DD blog fundraiser continues. Only a few days left!
When anyone asks how extremists get elected you don’t have to look at marquee national cases.
A man named Randy Toman of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is a perfect subject for profile. As the man behind the Lehigh Valley Conservative blog, over the course of the last couple years he’s published his ravings and weird world view for all to see. DD blog has occasionally linked to these things.
Now Toman is running to be a member of the Bethlehem Area School District
school board.
Toman is a Tea Partier and if one believes what he sets to print on his blog, he despises public school education.
On a second blog devoted to advertising his candidacy, one can see — here — that he cannot proof-read his headlines.
Toman is an anti-union ex-union man and a fellow who supports right-to-work in Pennsylvania (a union-busting position). He has often bemoaned the lack of Biblical teaching in secular public education. Another of Toman’s favorite riffs: Eternal damnation awaits those who do not hold the same Biblical reverence and beliefs as he does.
“I have been up to my eye balls, in the primary and getting on the ballet [sic] for this November’s general election here in Bethlehem, Pa,” Toman writes in one post.
“We have come to a point in history were there is an increasing danger of there being a belief that there [sic] ‘No Hell’,” he raves in another.
Toman continues:
“How is it that I can be so sure; because if that axiom of “NO Hell??? is accepted by the masses of people the consequences will be such that God will have no choice but to lift His hand off of this society. Showing them there is a Hell and they will not only be living in one presently but they will be assured they will be going to one upon death.”
“It can not be deigned [sic] that prayer, God and any reference to the Christian Religion has been taken out of or should I say thrown out of all public school here in this country,” Toman writes in yet another recent post. “That statement can not be argued to the contrary, it is true and well established.”
“[The] so called ‘Christian’ of today has no clue as to what is taught in the Bible and what should be a fair Biblical taxation,” Toman states in another semi-coherent post, an argument against taxation.
This post, and others like it, in addition to the regular complaints that secular education abandons the teachings of the Bible, seem to be the basis for his animosity for public school education.
At the Lehigh Valley Conservative blog Toman also obsesses about gold and the Treasury’s printing of money. He regularly states beliefs, apparently gained from the reading of weird fringe extreme right newsletters, that hyperinflation will cause the dollar to become worthless. And — today — that the President should be impeached because his birth certificate is a forgery.
One could spend days wading through the insane mess that constitutes the thinking on display at the Lehigh Valley Conservative.
Ordinarily, no one would have to do this. That’s because Toman was formerly just another private citizen, entitled to his opinons, no matter how nuts.
But Toman is running for a position of political influence in the Bethlehem School District. And his views show him completely unfit to hold any public office in a reasonable society, let alone one in which his decisions might have some impact on the educational environment of children.
Yet Toman could gain such a seat in November.
How could it happen? Easy. No one in the local news media has even shown the slightest interest in covering the political race or the views of the candidates running for the school board. Bethlehem is served by two newspapers — the Allentown Morning Call (where I worked many years ago), and the Easton Express-Times.
You can search a long time and find only this brief piece, here, which doesn’t even begin to hint at what Randy Toman is all about.
And that’s how extremists win elections, even those very small. The local upholders of truth negligently decide it’s not worth their time to explain to the locals what the people behind the names on the ballot really believe in.
We continue with our quality programming in a moment. Help keep it that.
DD blog needs your help. I’m not too proud to beg.
The economic crash of 2008 has been as hard here as everywhere else.
Since stepping into cyberspace in the early Nineties everything written has been provided largely pro bono. And this is the first fundraiser of any kind that I’ve held.
Originally, I went under the rubric of the old electronic Crypt Newsletter, an e-zine devoted to hacker culture, specifically that centered on the worldwide network of young computer virus-writers.
Much of the work published through it was aimed at increasing public understanding of issues in cybersecurity and the hype-laden subjects of cyberterrorism and cyberwar. That continues to this day.
In 1994 some of the earliest published content was used in The Virus Creation Labs, a book on the old computer virus underground published by American Eagle. Interesting side fact: While the book is now technically out of print, the publisher decamped to Central America before 2000, convinced the country would overturn or that hyperinflation would come about as the result of the Millennium Bug.
By 2004 I had moved to a slightly different place at GlobalSecurity.Org, still doing pro bono public research on various security topics.
This work moved into the domain of poison recipes, specifically those for ricin and alleged home-made chemical and biological weapons, which had originated in the American survivalist extremist fringe during the Eighties. By the Nineties these tracts had been migrated to the Internet and simultaneously translated into Arabic.
In terms of practical things, this was one of the first places you could see at least one of the claims made by the US government, delivered by Colin Powell in his address to the UN Security Council, on reasons for war in Iraq, shot to pieces.
The London ricin ring as a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda had been part of Powell’s presentation and the material published at Globalsecurity destroyed it.
At the time, the US news media largely ignored this but the work could not be erased. History had its way. (Examples of the news on the ricin trial in the US news media are here, at the Washington Post; and from Newsweek.)
Around 2006, the public work was formally moved to Dick Destiny blog.
Material published through here pushed back against mainstream and government claims that al Qaeda had capability in biological chemical weapons and that documents found on the Internet conferred equal capabilities to any jihadis interested in them.
While unpublicized that effort has been a success.
With the help of others the official public position was modified. One example was the grudging concession in the 2008 report from the US Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism: “We accept the validity of intelligence estimates about the current rudimentary nature of terrorist capabilities in the area of biological weapons … ” (Page 39.) Those intelligence estimates were not furnished by the US government’s analytical apparatus. They came from the work of outsiders, from here and analysis provided by colleagues.
Other proof is the anecdotal evidence that mainstream news is no longer littered with scare pieces insisting that al Qaeda men in some broken down hideout can make WMDs because of global access to terror capabilities granted by the Internet. Still, occasionally I have to issue burn notices on retired CIA men who resist getting the message. One example of such, from last year, is here.
Not bad for a blog.
Since then regular readers know I’ve kept up the fight while expanding into system domestic problems of economy and inequality which threaten the nation’s security in ways foreign threats during the war on terror never could.
This short history touches upon why the work has mattered. And so I ask for your help in keeping it moving forward and vital. Please help spread the word.
Donations are taken through PayPal. And you can still contribute without a designated PayPal account. Just page down to “Don’t have a PayPal account?” and click “continue.”
One favorite of the business press is the love of small business success stories. Because of economic failure and mass unemployment, they’re totally irresistible, particularly when they purport to finding someone who has made it after being fired.
The most notable case in recent news revolves around the woman seen all over the country in television ads for Chase Ink credit cards, the Jamie Dimon creation.
Beer and cupcakes, says the woman named Marlo, who started a bistro to serve them. That was the ticket.
It’s advertised as a tale of revenge, satisfaction and triumph against all odds. Marlo was fired, so she started Sweet Revenge before the cash ran out. And the business almost failed.
No one was interested. You can’t give free food and drinks away in NYC, apparently. I believe it.
Anyway, it took a fluke — delivering cupcakes to Martha Stewart and a subsequent guest appearance — to save the operation.
It was publicity no money could buy. And what isn’t mentioned in the story is that, knowing how the media works, I’m positive the press ignored Sweet Revenge, even though it was a unique idea, until it showed up on Stewart.
Anyway, these kinds of things are, as here, peddled as answers to corporate America’s animosity toward US labor.
Start your own business! That’s how we’ll all innovate our way to success.
It’s totally unworkable in a country the size of the US. Delusional, actually.
It requires miracles and astonishing strokes of good luck on the order of grains of sand on an acre of beach to make it work for millions of unemployed, even assuming they’re all perfectly disposed to being entrepreneurial.
Robert Morris, 78, a cryptographer who helped develop the Unix computer operating system, which controls an increasing number of the world’s computers, died Sunday in Lebanon, N.H.
The cause was complications of dementia, his wife, Anne Farlow Morris, said.
Known as an original thinker in computer science, Mr. Morris also played an important clandestine role in planning what was probably the nation’s first cyberwar: the electronic attacks on Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government in the months leading up to the Persian Gulf War of 1991.
In 1986, Mr. Morris went to work for the National Security Agency in protecting government computers and in projects involving electronic surveillance and online warfare.
It’s worth adding that “probably the nation’s first cyberwar” went totally unnoticed. Minor embellishment to ancient history or not, cyberwars — if they actually occurred — never had any visible impact on Saddam Hussein.
