All the nausea-provoking cliches of American war junk journalism have returned: “What would a military strike on [fill in the blank] look like?” [1]
Followed by numbing, intelligence-insulting descriptions of weapons platforms, maps with potential targets and quote from “experts” at US think tanks, all career dependent on continuous war. Tried to counter it with a column lampooning it, “Weapon of the Week,” at the Voice a decade ago. (Google.)
That did a damn fucking lot for my reputation.
There was also a big piece in the Post with said “experts” — alleged thinking of wise men — on whether or not a good bombing of Syria would be a “just war.” At this juncture it would not have occurred to me that any discussion of a remote-controlled strategic bombing campaign against any puny country, no matter how bad and which can barely defend itself, belongs on the same page as the word “just.”
No link, mostly because there’s nothing in it you can’t imagine.
Andrew Bacevich, the official retired military man voice-for-the- left, says it’s a bad idea, the same thing he said a decade ago about Iraq.
A Brookings flunky takes the opposite side of the coin, predictably.
A handful of religious men are nervous about the subject. They don’t much like talking about the US and the concept of “just war.”
One of them admits the US is not the sword of God, something that’s probably occurred to quite a lot of people. This is the only bit unusual as anything like it would usually be edited out.
And it’s mildly startling to see some people actually getting fidgety in print over discussions on the the US and prosecution of “just war.” Since they believe in a deity and an afterlife they are perhaps starting to think that eventually they’ll have to do some explaining and that “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” was always a pretty sickening tune.
You can say “God bless America” in the knee-jerk way of politicians and citizens but does he when you’re pushing the launch-cruise-missiles button? Or are you just feeling like you’re pushing your luck? Such teleological questions are real brain-twisters.
And, finally, at the end of the day, the Britishes showed some sense, many — a majority — thinking that dumping 200 cruise missiles and stealth bomber strikes into Syria at midnight will not likely make it a better place.
From the NYT:
“Prime Minister David Cameron said that Britain would not participate militarily in any strike against Syria after he lost a parliamentary vote by 13 … It was a stunning defeat for a government that had seemed days away from joining the United States and France in a short, punitive cruise-missile attack on the Syrian government …”
Which raises the question: “Why can’t we have nice things like ‘stunning defeats’ every now and then?”
[1.] War junk journalism, example provided by the Christian Science Monitor, a website that should not exist at all as its entire purpose is to furnish, as fast as possible, three or four paragraph blog posts on whatever is trending in search nationally:
[What] would a US attack look like?
First, it will probably start at night. US night-fighting capability is unsurpassed, and night attacks reduce the risk of civilian casualties, given that any civilian workers at Syrian military installations are likely to be home in bed. This could occur within days, perhaps as early as Thursday.
Second, the weapon of choice will almost certainly be precision-guided munitions. The US Navy has four destroyers within range of Syrian targets. Each Arleigh Burke-class destroyer has 90 vertical launchers for Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles and defensive missiles, according to a Syria attack plan produced by Christopher Harmer, senior naval analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. Depending on the mix of munitions loaded in these launchers, four ships should easily be able to hit Syrian targets with 180 Tomahawks.
US cruise missiles have a 1,000-mile range, meaning they can be launched hundreds of miles at sea. If they operate as intended, their accuracy carries them to within a few meters of their intended targets.
No link. That place sucks and so do those who work there.
The Bombing Paupers tab is, once again, officially open.
After more than 20 years of writing on specialized matters in national security, I’ve come up with a theorem that works on all things American.
The megastructure that now makes the national security a commodity has completely warped the thinking of Americans, from the top to the bottom.
So much so that it’s evident and can be described in a fairly simple rule, one that describes much of the war on terror and the American business of threat-seeking.
And here it is:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
Or, put another way, the probability that something bad will happen, as described or predicted by experts or any government, intelligence or quasi-corporate/government assessment agency, asymptotically approaches zero as it attains widespread use in popular entertainments. (And that’s usually very early in the development cycle.)
Therefore, you can bet your sweet bippy there’s never going to be an electronic Pearl Harbor, or an electromagnetic pulse attack, or a national blackout caused by Chinese hackers, or people dieing from a ricin mailing even though it’s so easy to make. And al Qaeda does not come back from being hided for more than a decade. No one gets a second chance.
Summed up: Too many bad movies, too much bad television, too much fear-making as edutainment, passed off as serious news, advised by bad people slumming from the national security industry, their purpose primarily maximization of employment. Everything touched by it, tainted by an intrinsic badness. And it is definitely not supported by the real world but must be maintained by a uniquely American machinery of manipulations, lies and purposeful technology-mediated confusion.
Plate 4, Irhabi007. Seven years ago, now jailed aspiring al Qaeda chemical and biological terrorist Younis Tsouli, aka Irhabi007, password-protected this .pdf jihadist translation of Maxwell Hutchkinson’s The Poisoner’s Handbook by combining the initials of the Islamic Media Center and part of his handle to make “IMC007.” Tsouli believed himself to be a secret agent.
Plate 5, Chemical Terrorism — Easy to Do!The same summer, a U.S. Army expert on chemical attack, James A. Genovese, was using this as a slide in a presentation on the alleged capabilities of terrorists.
Al Qaeda never launched a chemical or biological attack in the United States.
A word about the series, Fine Art from the War on Terror. In pictures taken from the archives of DD blog, it attempts to show the attitudes, beliefs and thinking from a time when the bad news on what terrorists could allegedly do came daily.
There are probably no similar examples on the web. Share with your friends.
Plate 1, The Botox Shoe of Death, un-reduced scan of the original from the summer, seven years ago. Made by your host at height of war on terror. The Washington Post newspaper ran a story on how al Qaeda was planning to strike with biological weapons, including botulism, citing one then newly discovered enemy web memo on the matter. They did not inform readers of the fine print which imagined putting botox on the shoes, a gaily laughable proposition.
Plate 2, The Mubtakkar of Death. About the same time as the al Qaeda Botox Shoe of Death Plan, journalist Ron Suskind revealed an al Qaeda plot in TIME, the Mubtakkar of Death, which was allegedly a cyanide bomb for use on the NY subway. But Ayman Zawahiri spared NYC, it was said.
I had to analyze whether the Mubtakkar was real. There was no evidence that it was although an al Qaeda drawing of a theoretical poison gas bomb that was not like the described Mubtakkar was found in the hands of DHS and distributed around the country as something to look out for. As GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow I was asked to go on NPR to discuss the alleged weapon. The segment was cancelled because I would not tell the host a scary story.
While there is a famous distasteful video of al Qaeda putting a puppy to death with poison gas, there is no public record of the terror organization ever deploying a cyanide bomb although an apocryphal tale, known only to a few, says an attempt was made at one in Afghanistan and that it did not work.
Scan with an aged paper, almost like papyrus, look. Both prints suitable for framing or silk-screening onto T-shirts as educational slices of real American history.
Proof that truth is stranger than fiction. Suitable for any modern iteration of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Since Roscoe Bartlett was run out of Congress leaving the cause of electromagnetic pulse doom-stopping in the hands of legitimate rape caucus member Trent Franks of Arizona, the old Cult of EMP Crazy has been gravely damaged. But like the twin phenomena of zombie dramatic cable television and movies, it always staggers forward, always has an audience.
Franks is known now mostly for joining the GOP legitimate rape thing a couple weeks back. This marking as a barely sentient human being means there’s very little chance that anything he sponsors on electromagnetic pulse defense will go anywhere.
The old Cult of EMP Crazy knows this liability so they’ve taken their cause and their merchandising to “the states.”
So [F. Michael Maloof, a columnist for the right-wing crank newsite WND.COM] says he’s been traveling to U.S. states to encourage state and local responses. “This is a new states’ rights issue,??? he says. “People can take action at the state level. I’m traveling around suggesting people get together with their local emergency response agencies and coordinators??? to plan for an EMP contingency.
Caveat, it’s hard to watch, a real WhiteManistan sleeping pill. But in the first few minutes readers may note that it’s a road show including old Cult of EMP Crazy chieftain, Frank Gaffney, who has made a career during the last few years going around to Republican do’s in red states to warn about the contamination of the US justice system by shariah law. Gaffney, it’s fair to say, has had great success in this, being one of forces behind the appearance of ridiculous anti-shariah legislation in a few red states.
For his part, F. Michael Maloof has been involved in the selling and merchandising of his book on electromagnetic pulse doom.
From POWER:
In his book [A Nation Forsaken], Maloof describes a hypothetical attack on Washington, D.C., that completely disrupts the nation’s capital and surrounding areas, including communications at the Pentagon. The attackers, he writes, use “small, rifle-sized arms that shoot not bullets but radio frequencies, weapons that can be built for about $400 with easy-to-obtain parts. Think of one of those Super Soaker water guns.
Maloof also describes how a terrorist cell with a primitive EMP weapon in the back of a panel truck could easily bring down a passenger airplane landing at Washington’s Reagan National Airport. “At the cost of a few thousand dollars in material and know-how, this homegrown terror cell kills more than a thousand people—several hundred passengers on the planes, the rest in the buildings that take the full impact of the crashing planes.???
DD readers know the Cult of EMP Crazy is a primary part of right-wing rural kook demographic known as “preppers,” citizens of WhiteManistan assiduously preparing for the fall of America, aka The End of the World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI).
On the art side we now have prepper electromagnetic pulse doom song and video. It is brief.
And it’s been awhile since we checked in on one of the best known preppers, the Patriot Nurse.
It’s quite a grab bag.
I didn’t spend much time commenting on Maloof’s electromagnetic pulse terrorism scenarios. The reason being, they’re all moldy oldies, having been run up the flag pole numerous times, starting about two decades ago.
Victor von Doom: a.k.a Dr. Doom, an arch villain in the Marvel Comics universe often portrayed handcrafting a variety of directed energy weapons — ray guns — with which to smite enemies; now used by Crypt Newsletter as a catch-all designation for computer security snake-oil salesmen and assorted crackpots spreading freaky tales of non-existent electronic [pulse] rays.
Usage: Victor von Doom, a faculty member at the University of Gobble-Wallah in Brisbane, Australia, warned frightened businessmen that a raygun capable of surreptitiously smashing networked corporate computers from a distance of half a mile could be easily fashioned from parts including a cattle prod, two potato knishes, one TV antenna and four car batteries.
Another definition from the old Joseph K Guide is updated for your enjoyment:
Booz Allen Hamilton: Contractor for the Pentagon which most Americans have never heard of; or, a secret corporation that relies almost exclusively upon taxpayer dollars for profits.
Usage: “The ideal Booz Allen Hamilton business product always involves classification so that outside audits, fraud investigations, accusations of illegality and meddlesome oversight can be side-stepped,??? a company vice-president patiently explained to the new hire.
It used to be the definition for Science Applications International Corporation, which is still around, but not as much in the news as BAH.
Joined with the electromagnetic pulse caucus in the House.
Trent Franks, famous last week for being part of the zoo of barely sentient animals from The Pit, aka GOP crackpots who opine on rape, in Politico:
“[Electromagnetic pulse] has the potential to be the ultimate cybersecurity threat because it can take our source of power completely away from us.???
Newt Gingrich was in town to prop Franks up in yet another run at legislation to fund the defending of the country from EMP doom.
And, naturally, no story on Gingrich and the Cult of EMP Crazy is ever complete without mentioning “One Second After,” the novel on electromagnetic pulse catastrophe come to America, a book that remarkably catalyzed the creation of hundreds of unreadable vanity novels made through Amazon’s CreateSpace. All done by the right wing demographic of white hoarders and arms stockpilers known as preppers.
Politico:
A science fiction novel called “One Second After??? told a cautionary tale of the doomsday scenario that would unfold if such an attack hit the U.S., frying electrical circuits and knocking out power. In the introduction to the book, Gingrich suggested that an EMP attack would “throw all of our lives back to an existence equal to that of the Middle Ages.???
“Millions would die in the first week alone,??? he wrote in the foreword of the novel released in 2009.
When Republican Roscoe Bartlett was booted out of the House permanently during the last election, it marked the official death of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. That’s because the head of the electromagnetic pulse cause in the House went solely into the hands of the leader of EMP caucus, Trent Franks of Arizona.
Trent Franks, in the video below, demonstrates that he barely even qualifies as a human being with the power of thought.
Yes, he’s one of the GOP’s large number of “legitimate rape” wackos.
The only good thing in this character defect from the heart of WhiteManistan is that it completely alienates the part of the country that isn’t despicable as well as insane.
And with the likes of Trent Franks in charge, the Cult of EMP Crazy is never going anywhere.
I’d remarked in November that Roscoe Bartlett’s removal from the House of Representatives had crippled the Cult of Electromagnetic Crazy. His caucus leader replacement, Trent Franks of Arizona, is a birther nobody even the most crazy in the GOP pay no mind.
This week the Cult had another spike put through its zombie head with the revelation that the Heritage Foundation’s “immigration study” was co-authored by a man, Jason Richwine, easily tied to a white bigot organization on the web.
I’m not going to go into the details. It’s big news on the political blogs.
But over the years electromagnetic pulse doom, aka the astro-turfing lobby for bombing Iran and buying more missile defense, has also been one of Heritage’s hobby horses.
Heritage Foundation was never a think tank. It’s just another propaganda mill funded by wealth to provide convenient studies and experts for the worst GOP impulses.
So anything that blows it up, like this, is very good.
Wheee! The Heritage Foundation is engaged in frantic damage control; not only did its big anti-immigration-reform report turn out to be a steaming heap of, um, bad research, but one of the co-authors turns out to have a serious white supremacist background.
It would be a terrible thing to happen to a serious think tank. But Heritage isn’t a serious think tank, which means that all of this is just a bit of overdue poetic justice.
Remember, Heritage came up with the ludicrous claim that the Ryan plan would cut unemployment to 2.8 percent, then tried to scrub the result from its records. It produced ludicrous “studies??? purporting to show that small farmers and businessmen were victims of the estate tax. And there are many, many more examples.
So, adios, Heritage and buddies in the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy. It’s been almost twenty years and I’ll miss you. But only a little.
The now infamous Cody Wilson successfully fired a 3D printed plastic pistol one time by hand, without maiming himself. The tech press went wild.
From Forbes, Wilson’s intellectually flimsy rationalization for making what is called the “Liberator:”
“[Cody Wilson] prefers to think of his Liberator in the same terms as its namesake, the one built for distribution to resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied countries in the 1940s. That plan was conceived in part as a psychological operation aimed at lowering the occupying forces’ morale, Wilson says, and he believes his project will strike a similar symbolic blow against governments around the world. ‘The enemy took notice that weapons were being dropped from the sky,’ he says. ‘Our execution will be better. We have the Internet.’ “
The journalist doesn’t even blink.
A claim that one is symbolically and virtually making a plastic gun available to those who wish to rise up against dictatorship worldwide doesn’t hold much water. The expense (at least $8k for what is Wilson’s used 3D printer) makes it so that’s not achievable. The people in such nations tend toward the poverty stricken.
Wilson is also ignorant of history but perhaps this is a sham for publicity purposes.
Anyone even slightly familiar with WWII history knows how the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS dealt with armed resistance, partisans and uprisings, which had much more than plastic guns.
As for current belief in the efficacy of a 3D plastic gun in enabling overthrow, one considers the current case of Syria, or Libya.
It’s Wilson’s career to foster this eyewash because he depends on philanthropic Bitcoin donation from other like-minded, very white, very libertarian, very right-wing nuisances with plenty of disposable income.
We can thank the NYT tech journalist who publicized Wilson to the greatest effect last year, making much of his work much easier to fulfill.
[At] Secrecy Blog, Steve Aftergood has mounted a Congressional Research Service report entitled “The U.S. Income Distribution and Mobility: Trends and International Comparisons.???
“Based on the limited data that are comparable among nations, the U.S. income distribution appears to be among the most unequal of all major industrialized countries … Empirical analyses estimate that the United States is a comparatively immobile society,??? it reads.
Obviously, we have offsetting benefits. Like a geek and supporters who will bring us a “redoubt??? of 3-D plastic gun manufacturing.
Disruptive technology is giving us such innovation, progress and collective and individual empowerment … God bless the USA.
A sad picture of unintended consequences is emerging in the investigation of five bald eagles that were poisoned and killed on the outskirts of a farming village on the Eastern Shore.
A sixth bird survived the ordeal and was released a week ago into the marshy wilds of Back Bay in Virginia Beach.
Wildlife experts and law enforcement officials say the five deaths, coming on the same day in early March and probably involving the same family, represent the largest killing event of bald eagles in Virginia history.
“We sometimes see one or two poisoned birds, but six? And with five dying? That’s unheard of,??? said Randy Huwa, executive vice president of the Wildlife Center of Virginia, a renowned animal-care clinic in Waynesboro.
At first wild-life experts suspected lead poisoning, from the eagles consuming carcasses loaded with shot.
But this was not what killed them. It was, instead, a far more powerful compound, one the newspaper never actually mentions.
I am not 100 percent certain but reasonably sure, from the oblique wording, that this was the result of use, possibly without government permit, of Compound 1080, also known as sodium fluoroacetate. (Another possibility, somewhat less likely because of the description, is the M-44 cyanide cartridge.)
Autopsies were performed on two of the dead birds, and both tested positive for the same powerful chemical that wildlife officials say was likely aimed at a nuisance animal prowling in the Birdsnest area – perhaps a coyote or a fox.
“We don’t think the eagles were the targets,??? said Sgt. Steve Garvis, an investigator on the Eastern Shore for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. “But somehow the eagles got into this stuff, and that was that. By the time we found them, it was too late.???
While saying the chemical in question “is not the kind of thing you’d buy at Lowe’s,??? given its intense toxicity, Garvis declined to name the poison, noting that the case remains under investigation.
A number of years ago I wrote about sodium fluoroacetate because it was found in the hands of the Hussein regime by the final work of the Iraq Survey Group.
Returning to the main body of the ISG’s assessment, an assessment which already has been discussed by many at great length, one finds on page 45 of the section entitled “Iraq’s Chemical Warfare Program — Annex A,” photos of a couple of interesting things: a picture of empty plastic perfume bottles and a bottler — said to be contemplated for use in squirting mustard gas into the faces of Americans — and a cardboard box with a bottle of a chemical investigated for its potential in assassinations.
While the ISG recovered no smoking gun of squirtable mustard gas, the chemical in the cardboard box was sodium fluoroacetate, also called Compound 1080.
Compound 1080 is converted into an analog which poisons a critical enzyme in the final common biochemical pathway of oxidation of food and nutrient molecules in aerobic organisms, for this case, warm-blooded animals. This reaction’s consequence is great toxicity.
Compound 1080’s use is very strictly controlled in the United States where government agency occasionally OK’s it for the killing of coyotes. Because of the compound’s well-documented hazard to animal life, even the dispensation of it in these cases is often subject to citizen protest.
In late 2004, the Department of Homeland Security was asked to halt use of the compound by Rep. Peter DeFazio, D – Ore. (Milstein, Michael, “Wolf poison raises alarm for its terrorist potential,” in -The Oregonian-, November 03, 2004)
So it is rightly seen as problematic that minions within the Hussein regime had interest in sodium fluoroacetate. It is not a thing that should be in the hands of tyrants, intelligence agencies, militaries, secret police or terrorists.
The Iraq Survey Group report says Iraqi intelligence services “researched a variety of chemicals including: Fluoro-acetate, nitrosoamine, strychnine, [and] thallium chloride …”
The ISG’s photo of a bottle of sodium fluoroacetate found in Iraq was taken in early May 2003. The bottle is labeled in English, as it should be, because fluoroacetate is manufactured by the Tull Chemical Company, of Oxford, Alabama. It is the only legal maker of sodium fluoroacetate in the United States.
Since the bottle of Compound 1080 recovered by the Iraq Survey Group has, potentially, such a clear provenance, it is surprising that there was no more comment on it in the report. It literally begged the inspector to contact its American vendor for information on the lot information, date of sale and final destination.
Was Compound 1080 bought directly by the Hussein regime or did it arrive through black market channels? If the former, how much Compound 1080 was purchased and what reason was given, if any, as to the need for it? Questions, questions, always more questions.
Within the overall context of the Iraq Survey Group report, the lack of information on the bottle of Compound 1080 is unusual because so much else in the total effort is meticulously detailed, extending to long tracts of analysis which are largely a collection of first person accounts and hearsays contributed by witnesses or prisoners of unknown credibility and condition. Of course, a highly regulated American-manufactured super poison in the hands of bad people is potentially awkward news, even if minor. But it is a little late in the game to be squeamish about such things now.
Killer of bald eagles as collateral damage of an attempt to kill a coyote or fox on Virginia’s eastern shore? Probably.
It’s worth emphasizing sodium fluoroacetate has no purpose other than poisoning living things, very badly. It has been the target of protests and complaints for years because of events like this. It is simply so toxic that when put into the wild, even in small quantity, it invariably takes down other furry and feathered neighborhood denizens that were not intended.
And so this has ended in tragedy on Virginia’s eastern shore.
DD’s piece for Globalsecurity in 2005 was made into a .pdf by PredatorDefense, a non-profit group that works for the cause of non-lethal control of wolves and coyotes for just such reasons as this unfortunate news describes.
Over the years, some American farmers, ranchers and others have hoarded sodium fluoroacetate and fought its ban on the grounds that they must retain the most powerful substances to protect their property.
Sodium fluoroacetate, Compound 1080, should never be in the hands of civilians (actually, make that perhaps all people) because this is what always happens.
While it is a substance of great lethality, it is of marginal utility but always with the potential for the most nasty of consequences.
Rewards totaling $7,500 are being offered in hopes of finding those responsible for the deaths of five bald eagles on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Since Compound 1080 is made only by one company in the US, if sodium fluoroacetate is the culprit, records should exist of sales in Virginia or the surrounding area. Such things could, theoretically, furnish leads.
In March, two congressmen – Reps. John Campbell, R-Irvine, and Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. – introduced a bill that would ban one of Wildlife Services’ most controversial killing tools: spring-loaded sodium cyanide cartridges that have killed tens of thousands of animals in recent years, along with Compound 1080 (sodium fluoroacetate), a less-commonly used poison …
Wildlife Services’ roots reach back to 1915, when Congress – hoping to increase beef production for World War I – allocated $125,000 to exterminate wolves, starting in Nevada.
Popular among ranchers, the effort was expanded in 1931 when President Herbert Hoover signed a law authorizing the creation of a government agency – later named the Branch of Predator and Rodent Control – “to promulgate the best methods of eradication, suppression or bringing under control” a wide range of wildlife from mountain lions to prairie dogs.
Federal trappers pursued that mission with zeal. They dropped strychnine out of airplanes, shot eagles from helicopters, laced carcasses of dead animals with Compound 1080 – notorious for killing non-target species …
“This is an ineffective, wasteful program that is largely unaccountable, lacks transparency and continues to rely on cruel and indiscriminate methods,” said Camilla Fox, executive director of Project Coyote, a Bay Area nonprofit.
“If people knew how many animals are being killed at taxpayer expense – often on public lands – they would be shocked and horrified,” Fox said …
