Aka George Smith e-mail: webmaster at dickdestiny
Keep in mind while watching this that al Qaeda is, for practical purposes, non-operational after ten years of being pounded on by the US military and clandestine operations machines
TSA stops teen for gun design on purse: wavy.com
Arguing with one of our protectors in such matters is like arguing with a lampshade.
Months ago I said the bad guys won. I stand by it.
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The title of this news items tells everything you need to know:
Oklahoma legislators want castor beans to be outlawed
Fast cut to the link and the first thing seen is the standard chubbish white guys in suits. Minor empirical proof the US began rewarding the useless and nasty decades ago.
The piece reads (it’s almost too intelligence insulting to believe):
Castor beans do not immediately leap to mind when one considers the state’s most serious problems.
And yet bills outlawing the production and transportation of castor beans were among the first filed in anticipation of next year’s legislative session.
Castor beans, being 50 percent or more oil, are the among the most promising biofuel crops.
They are also the source of one of nature’s deadliest poisons …
But state Sen. Mike Schulz, R-Altus, and Rep. Dale DeWitt, R-Braman, did not have terrorism or espionage in mind when they filed their castor bean bills this fall. They were concerned about a more direct threat – inadvertent contamination of the food supply.
“Prohibiting castor beans may not be something we want for the long-range,” DeWitt said. “But until we have more research into ways of lowering the ricin levels, we have to be very careful with it.”
Although castor plants are fairly common as ornamentals, their commercial production is virtually unknown in Oklahoma. With growing interest in them for biofuels, however, wheat growers and other crop producers became concerned about a burst of speculative cultivation spreading castor and ricin residue into fields, planting and harvesting equipment, storage bins and trucks and railroad cars used for transporting grain.
This is intellectual failure on so many levels it is difficult to know where to begin in explaining the stupidity of it.
At some time in the nation’s past — a few decades back — castor was a crop in the US. I have written about this before. None of it sticks. Journalists, politicians, and American alleged terror experts pay no attention to historical precedent or fact. If there are agricultural history and science books in libraries or old newspaper articles and stories to be consulted, they are all discounted and discarded for the apparent reason that people are now too lazy and crippled to be bothered to read them.
As an agricultural resource castor posed no real problem. It does not in those places around the world where it still is a crop. And castor mills in the United States were not poison dumps. People were not felled by wandering castor seeds in their morning cereal.
It is no longer a surprise to find that people around the world find Americans to be dangerously incompetent. Ignorance and the reward of it are now commonly seen at malevolent levels in this country.
Here’s a brief news item, republished here at DD blog, on the old timey production and milling of castor in the United States (the excerpt is from an article published in the newspaper of Plainview, TX in 2010):
Over the course of a decade, from 1959 until 1970, Plainview was considered the hub of domestic castor bean production with the local office of Baker Castor Oil ultimately contracting for 70,000 acres of production annually.
However, the crop’s success ultimately worked against it with practically no significant domestic production recorded after 1972. Since that time, the United States has been forced to turn to producers in India and Brazil to supply the majority of its needs.
Plainview Mayor John C. Anderson has a unique perspective on the local castor industry, having served as general manager of Baker Castor Oil’s local operations from August 1959 until December 1970.
“During most of that time Baker was the dominant player in the United States with about 75 percent of the castor oil production,” Anderson recalled last week, “and the Plainview facilities accounted for virtually all of that.”
The oil derived from castor beans is used in a vast array of products, ranging from paints, varnishes and lacquers to lipstick, hair tonic and shampoo. Since it does not become stiff with cold nor unduly thin with heat, castor oil is an important component in plastics, soaps, waxes, hydraulic fluids and ink. It also is used to make special lubricants for jet engines and racing cars, and during World War I, World War II and the Korean War it was stockpiled by the federal government as a strategic material.
Bayonne, N.J.-based Baker Castor Oil Company already was a major importer and processor when it embarked on a plant breeding program in the late 1950s centered in Plainview in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Baker needed a dependable domestic supply of castor beans since the government was building up its strategic reserve,” Anderson explained. “Baker at the time was having to primarily rely on what was being harvested by hand in Brazil and India from plants growing wild.”
Not only were there concerns about production and price volatility, the imported oil had a tendency to turn rancid during transport, Anderson said. A domestic source would reduce transportation costs while substantially improving quality. And, Plainview was a logical choice since the harvested crop could be shipped to crushing facilities on both East and West Coasts.
Amazing. Harvested castor seeds were crushed daily. And nobody died!
Obviously, in Oklahoma you can be … I don’t even wanna get into it.
The last decade, as well spawning many bad big things, gave birth to entire industries devoted to making bad, if only in ways a magnitude smaller or so than economic collapse.
Chief among these was the private-sectoring of homeland security. Across the country, small shops set up everywhere to sell security and intelligence contracting to state and city governments.
The businesses, often called terrorism research businesses and intelligence fusion centers, are probably already taking a bead on Occupy Wall Street and selling themselves to authorities only too willing to take advantage of such services. All in the name of the grand phrase, public safety.
Last year I wrote about one such company briefly, uncovered by the local newsmedia in Pennsylvania, when it began distributing terrorism reports naming various progressive groups, and the indie film-maker auteur responsible for Gasland (the expose on the natural gas “hydro-fracking” industry.)
What to do if you’re in the business of counter-terrorism in, say, a place like Pennsylvania? And there just aren’t enough jihadists around to fill a decent report for the state government client. Answer: Reclassify democratic activity as trouble. Problem solved!
From my old homestate of Pennsylvania, this bit of unintentional dark humor, courtesy of the Associated Press:
Information about an anti-BP candlelight vigil, a gay and lesbian festival and other peaceful gatherings became the subject of anti-terrorism bulletins being distributed by Pennsylvania’s homeland security office, an apologetic Gov. Ed Rendell admitted.
Also in the anti-terrorism bulletin: “[Events] likely to be attended by environmentalists …”
And who was getting the funding for this valuable intelligence on the state of homegrown terrorism?
Something called the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, in Philadelphia, to the tune of $125,000 …
On page 11 of the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response’s sample May 2009 anti-terrorism briefing, the organization lumps a number of equally surprising activities under the topic “Domestic/Eco-Terror Alerts.”
Among these, “the Rainforest Action Network is holding training at campuses across the [continental United States]. The training is designed to inspire ecological activity — from legitimate canvassing to illegal direct actions.”
The very legit Rainforest Action Network is here. It looks like a happy place.
In another posting, the company’s Terrorism Research bulletin, entitled “Actionable Intelligence Briefing,” reads: “Ecological activists in [San Francisco, Phoenix, Tuscon and Sonora} will be protesting the intent of Mexico to build a toxic waste dump on land belonging to the O'odham Indians."
Other "domestic/eco-terror alert" entries include notes on protests of the Bank of America bailout scheduled for Senator Dianne Feinstein's office, "a protest march ... held by people opposed to the closing of some schools in New York City, "eco-activists" from Earth First! holding a summer training camp, institute analysts noting an appearance by Karl Rove as an opportunity for "anarchist groups," as well as a variety of anti-war and anti-cruelty-to-animals protest events.
The anti-terrorism briefing booklet makes a practice of classifying people and groups who protest corporate activities as anarchists.
"Working with organizations that refuse to surrender their domestic or international operations to terrorism," reads the pamphlet.
Terrorism, in this case, seeming to broadly rope in constitutionally protected activities contrary to the interests of corporate and government clients.
What would actually be surprising would be if companies like this, all fruit of the homeland security boom, weren't already working OWS. Readers, and many Americans -- generally, know there is certainly no shortage of people at the top of national government, as well as at the bottom of local townships, willing to immediately renew contracts to local goons promising to keep them appraised on people alleged to be causing civil unrest.
Invariably, all these businesses are spin-offs from the national security infrastructure, employing ex-law enforcement, military and intelligence
men only marginally interested in rights, due process of law and democracy. On a much smaller level, they follow the business practices of the big mercenary army/private security companies like Blackwater.
And they have exploded with taxpayer funding during the past decade.
It's worth adding that private security has a long history of misuse in this country. The employment of the Pinkertons against the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania in the late 1800's comes to mind.
Another small homeland security industry now of importance is the one devoted to "non-lethal" weaponry in the United States. Small and large businesses, as well as the big arms developers, got involved in peddling various new arms to the government and police forces, all using the argument that technological advances would allow for non-bloody crowd control.
The most public example was The Sheriff, a high-powered microwave gun mounted on a Hummer and developed by Raytheon. The Sheriff took over a decade of taxpayer investment and an incredible public relations effort to push it (one that failed spectacularly) as a revolutionary weapon which could be used to disperse crowds.
Publicly, it was a disaster. The Sheriff was taken to Afghanistan a year or so ago and quietly brought back without firing one microwave shot in anger. It was, and still is, simply viewed as a device for torturing people who can't fight back.
At which point in time Raytheon began peddling a much smaller mounted version of it for use in the California prison system.
The essential point to be made is a simple one. All the arguments for the development and use of "non-lethal" weapons rely upon the success in getting people to believe there is some magic point of force application in which people are not irrevocably injured or killed.
In real life, this point is imaginary. It does not exist. And there is no scientific method that can be used to find or elucidate it. As any perusal of the literature on use of tasers, rubber bullets and tear gas quickly reveals.
However, the argument remains seductive particularly when governments or law enforcement need rationalizations for using force short of bullets on the unarmed.
What the "non-lethal" weapon does is set the bar downward for the use of force. When one equips a military or law enforcement agency with weapons which the average soldier or policeman believes will not hurt people because they have been told there is a science to them making them safe, the problem becomes obvious.
With the images of tear gas and people wounded in Oakland and other protests flashing around, you can bet there are at least pitches being made to sell use of more non-lethal weaponry. The only consolation is one of coincidence. Economic collapse has made it much harder for local government to buy the newer non-lethal weapons developed during the war on terror. The money is no longer there.
An example of the companies involved in this kind of thing was written about a couple of months ago here.
One motorized crowd control system, it generates loud screeching noise with the idea that ear pain makes people run away, was deployed in Pittsburgh where it has been mostly just a nuisance.
It came out of the idea that sound could be used to shatter the ear drums of "terrorists" on airplanes, without killing passengers.
If common sense is telling you that such a thing is fairly dubious, you're not alone. However, that has never impeded the development of such things.
When still free-lancing for the Village Voice, I wrote a little about this.
Two examples from the war on terror, The Electrocuting Water Cannon and The Sonic Pain Stick are at the links.
From the Electrocuting Water Cannon:
[The company] certainly has expertise in this [non-lethal] area. It has manufactured something called the Sticky Shocker, a technological annoyance that looks like the giant cocklebur from hell. It’s designed to lodge on people with “tenacious glue” and barbs in order to dispense stunning volts.
Although the latest hazard to humanity hasn’t been tested on live subjects, Jaycor material claims it is voltage-regulated according to some Underwriters Laboratories standard of acceptable partial electrocution. One can only wonder at the way such a remarkable standard was arrived at—perhaps by dropping hair dryers or radios into bathtubs occupied by volunteers?
It is patently obvious that a vehicle-mounted shocking water hose is an atrocious mechanism that would instantly doom the career of anyone who ordered its use on American streets.
While this particular thing no longer appears to be around, the logic behind is still alive and well.
60 Minutes went to Afghanistan. Ryan Crocker and a four-star general, John Allen, were the featured sources.
They repeatedly made the case how vital Afghanistan was. Afghanistan, informed 60 Minutes, costs $300 million a day. There were videos of schools being built, fortifications being made, roads being graded. Heavy US equipment was everywhere.
The MRAPs explosive resistant truck has morphed into a gigantic armored beast you’d imagine at home in a science-fiction movie set on a hostile desert planet. It looked invulnerable. It also looked like the very picture of fail.
There were 50 some al Qaeda men left in Afghanistan, 60 Minutes estimated.
Here at home, everything rots except the fortunes of those building MRAPs and providing supply for the war.
“Over the last couple of years, about 250,000 teachers have been laid off back home … ” reporter Scott Pelley said. “The U.S. has 98,000 troops here, plus 40,000 from NATO,” he said a bit earlier.
Ryan Crocker wore a dashing pair of sunglasses inside a helicopter.
There are no encouraging words in the comments section of the posted transcript.
Following on the last post of unintentional humor found in content/word cloud analysis spun off DD blog syndicated content at Globalsecurity.Org.
Anyway, you click on one of the links for related content. And here’s the snapshot.
I can’t fabricate this stuff.
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New Empire’s Dog Feces material, lads, Wired and Reuters on the excrement stick about a computer virus (a keystroke logger) on the Creech AFB network used to control Predator drone missions.
No links.
Full of anonymous sources, obvious US mil tech geeks getting erections over spilling the beans, readers are informed no one is panicking yet.
As a matter of context, DD remembers computer viruses being found on US military systems used in the Yugoslavia/Serbia, a computer virus on a space shuttle computer, and numerous viruses — one infamous piece of malware infiltrated on a thumb drive — on networked computers used in Afghanistan.
It’s safe to say malware as well as spyware has probably been found wherever we have networked computers involved in killing various paupers around the world.
“Holy s—, man!” I hear someone mutter. “It’s Predator drones!”
Yeah, so? All things considered, what took so long?
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A recent investigative feature from a Denver newspaper goes into the case of Najibullah Zazi, the failed terrorist who wished to make subway bombs from beauty parlor supply store chemicals.
The paper relates the counter-terror operation that nabbed him. The government intercepted e-mails, was quickly on the stick and tailed Zazi all the way to New York City.
The newspaper compares him to Mohammed Atta.
Atta, however, appeared to be no fool. And his efforts actually worked — spectacularly from the point of view of al Qaeda.
Zazi, on the other hand, was like many al Qaeda men who apparently believe everything they read in newspapers about how easy it is to make explosives from recipes found on the net. They reason that since it is in print, it must be so.
Then the real world intervenes:
The bomb-making instructions the FBI recovered from Zazi’s e-mails showed sophistication. According to the FBI, 30 grams of the substance Zazi wrote about would be enough to blow up a concrete block. Zazi’s notes indicate he intended to make up to 10 pounds — enough to blow up subway cars and everyone in them, Olson said.
“These guys were familiar with the New York subway. They knew what trains are most crowded when, and that’s what they focused on.” Olson added. “It would have been catastrophic.”
But he was caught because, starting Aug. 28, 2009, he began trying to make the explosives in the hotel room and failed every time. He frantically e-mailed an al-Qaeda facilitator in Pak istan named Ahmad, and it was those e-mails that the FBI intercepted.
In the end, Zazi’s major undoing was that he was either a bad chemist or took poor notes, Olson said.
DD has long maintained the real world is not interested in the stupid beliefs of counter-terror men and would-be terrorists who think all kinds of insta-mayhem-magic is at their fingertips on the Internet.
However, one can judge the quality of the jihadist by their reliance on such things. And history has show, again and again, that quality is very poor. If one is going to make improvised explosive devices, there’ are shortcuts to be had when trying to acquire a practical capability.
The men in the 9/11 attack did not rely on received wisdoms read in newspapers or Internet recipes.
And, as a side bit of history, they illustrate that if you run through your best soldiers in a kamikaze attack, no matter how spectacular the success, you may not find such resourceful human capital again.
Previously — on Zazi Shnazi.
The entire collection of posts on the beauty parlor supply store bomb plot – from the archives.
The latest story on “homegrown” alleged terrorist Rezwan Ferdaus, aka “Bollywood,” caught in one of the FBI’s fictitious plots reminds DD of the hapless motorcycle gangsters from Clint Eastwood’s Any Which Way You Can.
You can count on the usual terrorism experts to wring their hands and warn balefully about the ingenuity of the perpetrator.
But it’s hard to do anything but smirk at the pictures revealing a plan to bomb the Pentagon with the biggest toy planes the FBI could buy for the fellow.
If you do the arithmetic on the amount of C-4 the government was said to have baited him with, it means Bollywood actually thought he could hurt the Pentagon with 15 pounds of the stuff. (And bring down some bridges with the leftovers.)
The Boeing 757’s used on 9/11 have takeoff weights which range “from 220,000 pounds (99,800 kilograms) up to a maximum of 255,000 pounds.”
Ferdaus was, the newspaper says, someone with a bachelor’s degree in physics from Northeastern.
Hmmm, apparently this did not include contemplating the energy carried by large masses in motion. As contrasted with small ones. (The truth is, and laymen may not know it, is that bachelor’s degrees in the hard sciences in the US don’t usually qualify one for anything other than being someone’s minor lab assistant.)
The problem for al Qaeda remains the low quality of its recruits, whether they’re self-motivated or trained oversees. Despite tactics and inspirational materials spread over the Internet, the cause just isn’t effective at bringing the extremely capable into the fold.
We may see the occasional success here and there but they really do appear to be the exceptions to the rule.
Naturally, you’ll never see this conclusion pushed by our counter-terror experts or in any big newspapers. It creates static for an environment in which the eternal war footing can be maintained.
Now, back to al Qaeda men lending themselves to satire. For that I give you this bit from Any Which Way You Can.
Black Widows gang leader: Why me, Lord? I mean, other men — you made out of clay. My men … you made outta shit.
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From a monetizing-Homeland-Security publication:
American intelligence officials recently warned that AQAP is actively involved in efforts to produce the deadly poison ricin for use in attacks inside the United States. According to analysts, the poison would likely be packed around small explosive charges that would disperse the deadly toxin on detonation. Ricin is so deadly that even a minute quantity can kill someone if inhaled or otherwise absorbed into the blood stream. But while American intelligence is aggressively pursuing investigation of this threat, it’s severely hampered by the chaos on the ground in Yemen. The virtual collapse of Yemen’s government has allowed Al Qaeda to expand its operations throughout the country …
The truth is, there is no finish line – there is only eternal vigilance.
The tagline: “Charles Faddis is a retired CIA covert operations officer and the former head of the Agency’s WMD terrorism unit.”
The CIA’s WMD terrorism unit? No WMD’s (in their real sense) have been found during the decade of the war on terror. That is ZERO.
“[Faddis] is author of, Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, and, Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security. His first novel, Codename Aphrodite, which is based on his experiences as a covert operative abroad, was published in June …”
And if you’re wondering why DD has never had a book on the subject, the answer is fairly obvious. In a world where the stuff published is as you see above, of what monetary value is the material found here?
Rhetorical, of course. The only consolation is that you can’t pay regular people enough to make them read the ocean of books like those cited.
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The United States is building a ring of secret drone bases in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of an aggressive campaign against al Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing U.S. officials.
One base for the unmanned aircraft is being established in Ethiopia and another base has been installed in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, the newspaper reported.
A small fleet of “hunter-killer” drones resumed operations in the islands this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the unmanned drones could effectively patrol Somalia from there, the report said.
The U.S. military also has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in the African nation of Djibouti and the CIA is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula to deploy drones over Yemen, the article said.
The Empire’s dog feces American innovation and technical supremacy on display, for knuckling a few of the poorest as long as we like, so that the 45 million on food stamps and those who aren’t can allegedly sleep easier.
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