Klein, one of the alleged good guys, is a product of our culture of lickspittle. The piece at Bloomberg was as self-serving as they come, another essay to get on “most e-mailed” and read lists, as what happens with anyone who is in the small circle of anointed opinion-makers.
For his piece Klein went to the trouble of digging up Ken Pollack, a discredited national security expert whose book, The Threatening Storm, was used by the Bush administration as part of its global p.r. push (and I do mean global) for the Iraq War. Pollack, Klein told readers, had influenced his opinion on the necessity for war with Iraq. Klein had been a supporter and this week he is sorry for that.
Ken Pollack, as a Brookings Institution scholar, appeared in the news over ten years ago hundreds, if not thousands, of times. He was on television, he was on radio, he was on the Internet. His book was a best-seller. Pollack was as close to being a public figure and celebrity as someone from the Brookings Institution can get.
By 2007, The Threatening Storm was selling for 37 cents used on Amazon. Today it’s worth a penny a copy.
What I haven’t seen are any excerpts of how maddening and rotten news stories and opinions are from that time. Ezra Klein, for example, didn’t get into the horrendous reinforcing and congratulatory press on Pollack’s work. He didn’t republish anything of the quality that makes one gag.
Pollack argues his case well, going beyond the vituperative pronouncements of the administration to link operational objectives to national strategy, but he does not spend much time on the reconstruction of the country, which is, after all, the reason for invasion in the first place. He does make two noteworthy points, however: the removal of Saddam would allow for withdrawal of most of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region; and second, with its wealth in oil, Iraq can pay for its own reconstruction. Naturally, there are advantages and disadvantages to each option, and critics abound, but for Pollack the question is “not whether [we invade], but when.” — from a review of the man’s best-selling book in the Naval War College Review, Autumn 2002
You can tell a lot by the books people read, especially when the readers are members of Congress making life and death decisions about a war.
Winston Churchill is big on Capitol Hill, among both Democrats and Republicans. So is Kenneth Pollack’s new book, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq,” whose title is derived from Churchill’s “The Gathering Storm.”
Not on the must-read list are books like Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down,” a harrowing account of just how grim urban street fights can get, even for today’s most elite forces. Nor, judging by interviews and the buzz on Capitol Hill, is there a surge of interest in “hearts and minds” books on Arab history or the culture of radical Islam. — The Christian Science Monitor, December 2002
Sean Penn needs to read [Ken Pollack’s] book. So do Mike Farrell, George Clooney and all the protesters who marched and chanted against an American-led war on Iraq in cities across the world last weekend. — The New York Observer, January 2003
“Saddam has taken the entire Iraqi [WMD] program on the road,” said Iraq expert and former National Security Council official Kenneth Pollack in his recent best-selling book, “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.” — subsequently repeated thousands of times, like an incantation to ward off common sense, in the Scripps Howard newswire, February 2003
Given Saddam Hussein’s current behavior, his track record, his aspirations and his terrifying beliefs about the utility of nuclear weapons, it would be reckless for us to assume that he can be deterred. Yes, we must weigh the costs of a war with Iraq today, but on the other side of the balance we must place the cost of a war with a nuclear-armed Iraq tomorrow. — Pollack, on Hussein’s alleged WMD program and the reason for war, in the New York Times opinion page, February 2003. One bets they wish they hadn’t done that now.
Despite its human and financial cost (which [Ken Pollack] says could be less than we think even as we prepare for the worst), we are the only ones who can prevent the world from facing a nuclear-armed Hussein. It’s in our interest; it is our duty. — Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, 2002
While the anti-war forces are derided, the media have turned pro-war intellectuals into stars. Each time you look up, you find another interview with Kenneth Pollack, the ex–CIA analyst whose book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq is the bible of war supporters. — LA Weekly, February 28, 2003
While Iraqis “danced in the streets of Baghdad” in DC the “jibes were out for the naysayers who had feared a grueling and protracted conflict” to oust Saddam Hussein. VP Cheney called the war “one of the most extraordinary military campaigns ever conducted” and “praised the ‘carefully drawn plan.'” Cheney “was riding high” “as one of an elite corps of political prophets who had accurately forecast a quick collapse” of Saddam’s regime. Cheney insisted that the war “would last ‘weeks, not months.'” Others who predicted a short and decisive victory included Sec/Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Dep. Sec/Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Defense policy analyst Richard Perle, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), ex-CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, and ex-Reagan admin. official Kenneth Adelman (Efron, Los Angeles Times) — Bragging Rights for Iraq, The National Journal, April 2003
“It’s looking like in truth the Iraqi (weapons) program was gray. The Bush administration was trying to say it was black,” said former CIA Iraq expert Kenneth Pollack, now at the Brookings Institution, a research center.
Pollack, who advocated a war to overthrow Saddam, said he believes more evidence of Iraqi weapons activity will be found. — Knight-Ridder newspapers, June 2003
The Bush administration-funded worldwide book blitz.
Even as President Bush delivered his pivotal speech on September 12th to the United Nations regarding the conduct of Hussein’s regime, we noted there was a very timely book launched at the same time by Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institute called, “The Threatening Storm.” We contacted Mr. Pollack and asked him if he would interrupt his book tour, which was not that easy to persuade him to do, and he agreed and went on a number of digital video conferences and visits to countries as far spread as France, Austria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, and now he’s scheduled for South Africa and he’s agreed to do a series more. He’s that third voice, and he is speaking about the cases, pro and con, of invading Iraq in a more reasoned and reasonable way than most people could, and he has another voice to offer. — Undersecretary of State Charlotte Beers, at the National Press Club, December 2002
At a press briefing Dec. 18, State Dept. public diplomacy topper Charlotte Beers announced that her division has asked author Ken Pollack to interrupt a book tour and travel overseas to talk about his book “The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq.”
Turns out the State Dept. also has been courting foreign journalists over the past year.
“We set up many more responsive facilities than we’ve had in the past for the foreign press at the president’s ranch in Texas, at the White House and in our own State foreign press centers, which are Washington, New York and Los Angeles,” Beers said.
Storytelling stressed
A former Madison Avenue exec, Beers extolled the importance of “storytelling” in convincing overseas ads that the U.S. is only trying to do good. — Daily Variety, December 2002
In fact, one of the reasons to go to war with Iraq sooner, rather than later, is so that we never find ourselves in that position where Saddam Hussein has nuclear weapons and we have to risk the obliteration of Riyadh, or Kuwait, and the Saudi oil fields, or Amman, or any of the other capitals of the region that we would worry so much about. Or, for that matter, New York. If the Iraqi’s decided to put a nuclear weapon on a freighter, they could just drive it into New York Harbor and have the same effect there. — Pollack, State Department-sponsored worldwide video conference, two weeks before war
In hitting American forces with chemical weapons, Saddam would exact vengeance, said Ken Pollack, a former CIA analyst now with Brookings. He also might hope to delay them from entering the city. — Course of Baghdad Battle Hinges on Unknowns, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 2003
“Unlike so many Iraqi oppositionists, [Ahmed Chalabi] actually does what he says he’s going to do,” says Ken Pollack, research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. — from an article that should have been entitled, “Ahmed Chalabi — A Great Guy!” by Sally Quinn, the Washington Post, November 2003
“I think that we will find the [WMD] stuff,” Ken Pollack said. “I think it’s simply a matter of time, but I think that we will find, at the very least, the production capability.” — in another State Department-funded worldwide videoconference with Ken Pollack, one entitled “Dr. Wrong, Once Again and With Passion,” May 2003
In a New York Times op-ed piece, Brookings Institution analyst Ken Pollack writes “the search for Iraq’s nonconventional weapons program has only just begun. In the meantime, accusations are mounting that the Bush administration made up the whole Iraqi weapons threat to justify an invasion. That is just not the case – American and its allies had plenty of evidence before the war, and before President Bush took office, indicating that Iraq was retaining its illegal weapons program” — Pollack in the NYT via the National Journal, June 2003
In a world that valued logic and scholarly thought, Ken Pollack would have been run off the reservation a long time ago. This isn’t that world.
Americans no longer have any idea who Ken Pollack is. But that shouldn’t stop you from reading these excerpts or recommending the DD blog post to others.
It’s helpful to again have a look at the manipulated groupthink and how hard to stomach it is.
Ken Pollack, then. Once a very important person, now a nobody and a fraud, still a symbol for our time.
I don’t have much to say for the anniversary week of the Iraq War. For 99 percent of America it’s been all downhill ever since, including me.
The GWB administration and the mainstream media broke everything.
No news agency ever really recovered from the role played in supporting the frauds of the American government. They’re worse now in that they’ve almost entirely given up on doing any critical reporting on national security issues.
As I’ve written recently, almost all the people I knew who actually did opposition work either quit or blew away in the intervening period. Being on the outside got old, people got old. I got old.
Klein admits he was a flack for the war as a college student and believed the say-so of a man almost no Americans can remember, Ken Pollack, a “liberal hawk” who had written a book that became a bestseller for the cause of war.
Pollack’s Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq sells sells for a penny a copy, used. The third party sellers make their small profit on charging you a bit extra for mailing.
Because he’s aggrieved Klein spends an overlong column digging up Pollack for an interview. The only good part, one Klein doesn’t mention, is that Pollack and his colleague, Michael O’Hanlon, another now infamous think-tank “expert” ubiquitous in the news before the tanks rolled, did suffer as a result of the Iraq debacle.
While they remained in the “community” of national security experts, they were thoroughly discredited. The only other person this happened to was Judy Miller of the New York Times who was run out of the profession for the frauds on Saddam’s alleged WMDs published in that newspaper.
Klein wants to know what Pollack thinks now. It’s another exercise in excuse making.
Ezra Klein is a product of our culture of lickspittle. He has a reputation because he’s young, published everywhere that’s liberal and is on MSNBC. He does a mea culpa so he has a clear conscience going forward.
The week US armor seized Baghdad and broke the back of Iraqi conventional resistance, the publisher canceled the column. They were buffaloed along with almost everyone else.
War over! Everyone was cheering. George and Dick were right. WMDs were going to be found any day. Old Don Rumsfeld was complaining the news outlets were showing the same videotapes of Iraqis stealing everything not nailed down over and over.
Yay. Don’t you feel things have become so much better?!
In 2004 I was the first person in this country to find that Colin Powell’s Security Council assertion that Hussein’s Iraq had been connected to a ricin plot in London was a fraud. At GlobalSecurity.Org we tried to take it to US newspapers and none would have it. They had simply quit doing their job.
The Wit and Wisdom of Ken Pollack — from the archives. All the way back when I still had a beard because it hadn’t turned half white.
The US national security megaplex has set up a system rife with internal contradictions. As a consequence it has no firm ground to stand on when making arguments about what is and is not appropriate conduct by other nations.
And so it is with the shoeshine of cyberwar. NSA director Keith Alexander, or General Keith Shoeshine, now slightly infamous for making the absurd claim that cyberwar against the United States constitutes “the greatest transfer of wealth in history” is a man who can only make arguments from authority.
This was on display on Tuesday of last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The chief of the military’s newly created Cyber Command told Congress on Tuesday that he is establishing 13 teams of programmers and computer experts who could carry out offensive cyberattacks on foreign nations if the United States were hit with a major attack on its own networks, the first time the Obama administration has publicly admitted to developing such weapons for use in wartime.
“I would like to be clear that this team, this defend-the-nation team, is not a defensive team,??? Gen. Keith Alexander, who runs both the National Security Agency and the new Cyber Command, told the House Armed Services Committee. “This is an offensive team that the Defense Department would use to defend the nation if it were attacked in cyberspace. Thirteen of the teams that we’re creating are for that mission alone.???
General Alexander has been a major architect of the American strategy on this issue, but until Tuesday he almost always talked about it in defensive terms …
Since it was theater, no one asked a tough question.
A tough question would have been to ask our cyberwar shoeshine man why the US had created an environment in cybersecurity that was one big conflict of interest.
Last year Alexander spent a lot of time campaigning in support of cybersecurity legislation. That effort failed in Congress. But during it he lobbied for more instantaneous “information sharing” on cybersecurity threats, signatures and trouble between the government and corporate America.
However, in cyberspace the US government, in developing and unleashing malware on its enemies in the Middle East, has made a world environment where vulnerabilities are commodities and capabilities, information not to be shared because of applications in cyber-weaponry.
The history with regards to information sharing is fifteen years old.
It started with the Clinton administration where it was vigorously pursued by Clarke and assistant secretary of defense John Hamre. They argued for an exception to be added to the Freedom of Information Act, one to encourage corporate America to be forthright about its computer security intrusions, secure in the knowledge its secrets were safe from competitors and journalists armed with FOIA.
They got what they wanted. And it didn’t make a substantial difference. Subsequently, every year — between then and now — someone has always argued for ever more information sharing. Corporate America is not transparent. A frictionless system of information passage with it cannot be created.
Paradoxically, the US government has contributed to the creation of a global Internet security environment where information is not to be shared because there is value in that. Critical vulnerabilities have great worth in cyber-weapons development. This has created a gray market in which the vulnerabilities, information of zero social value, are sold at good profit.
As with discussions about cyberwar and the creation of cyber-weapons, the American government, by its actions, has cut the ground from under its feet on being in position to take the high ground, right from the start.
You can’t have operations reliant upon security information sharing and security information hoarding and develop trust. In fact, no one should trust you to do the right thing at all. It’s a natural and obvious conflict of interest.
Sorry, General Shoeshine.
Unfortunately, we have a press that gave up on pointing stuff like this out years ago. And the New York Times article on Alexander’s Congressional testimony did not mention it.
General Keith Shoeshine of the NSA believes cyberwar is causing the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.
Can you see the shaded area where cyberwar and Chinese hacking created the greatest loss of wealth in US history?
In England there are still a few people willing to call rubbish rubbish.
When Roscoe Bartlett, mainstay of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy, had his House career ended in the November election it dealt a heavy blow to the lobbying group. With Newt Gingrich being run off the national stage yet again, two of its most vigorous personalities were cut down.
Although Bartlett never got any legislation passed he did pursue the cause of defending the nation against electromagnetic pulse doom with dogged tenacity.
Franks is a nobody with no pull, someone his own party hardly pays attention to. Which means any movement of electromagnetic pulse defense legislation either quickly dies in committee or is summarily wiped off the bottom of Congressional shoes like a mildly annoying bit of dog excrement.
This week the National Journal ran a piece on the fate of the electromagnetic pulse caucus. It noted the caucus had expanded its membership from 11 to 18.
However, it’s leader, Trent Franks, is such a busted screwdriver he doesn’t even list it under his tabs for committees and caucuses on his home page.
A small but growing cadre of House members is set to relaunch efforts to protect the nation against what they say is a very real threat: the unleashing of an electromagnetic pulse either by a solar storm or a nuclear-armed foe that could cripple much of the nation’s electrical infrastructure.
“I realize there is skepticism, and I understand it’s easy to dismiss this as something coming from people who might go around wearing tinfoil hats,??? said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., one of the leaders of the little-known bipartisan congressional Electromagnetic Pulse Caucus …
The caucus is bipartisan in that it includes two nobodies from the other side of the aisle as tokens, Yvette Clark and Loretta Sanchez.
More infamous members are crackpot Steve King, recently in the news as one of the people Karl Rove has targeted as a nuisance politician who won’t be able to win a Senatorial run in Iowa because “he is the poster boy for over the top, racially tinged rhetoric in his attacks on President Barack Obama,” notes the Grio.
“Not only has King compared the president to Saddam Hussein, and called the president ‘very, very urban,’ on the House floor, he has also said, ‘The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race on the side that favors the black person,’ ??? it continues.
Like Franks, Steve King is a birther.
Also on the caucus is Paul Broun, another raging GOP sociopath (there are many), in the news for great quote like:
“I was the first Member of Congress to call [Obama] a socialist who embraces Marxist-Leninist policies like government control of health care and redistribution of wealth.
“All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.”
One of the many liabilities of the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy lobby is that, robot-like, it still refers to the “Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States From Electromagnetic Pulse Attack.??? Originally written in 2004 and revised in 2008, it’s now nine years old, five if you’re feeling generous.
The Commission principal was William Graham, an old Reagan adviser and peddler of the “Star Wars” missile defense program.
It’s a twin problem, not only because of now creaking antiquity, but because of the solid impression, one the caucus and Franks cannot escape, that it’s just part of the missile defense lobby.
Prior to Roscoe Bartlett’s defeat in November, the EMP Crazy lobby generally tried to get at least one opinion or mainstream article on electromagnetic pulse doom ending civilization into the news feed at least once a week.
Since the election all the mojo is gone.
The majority of pieces on electromagnetic pulse doom are now all published by WND.com, the right wing conspiracy website most famous as the parking stall of Ted Nugent’s weekly column cursing the president, and peddling Jerome Corsi, yet another crackpot who promotes “a staggering number of outlandish conspiracies about the president, including that Obama has a fake birth certificate and stolen Social Security number; that Obama is both secretly gay and secretly Muslim; and that Obama and his family have lied about the true identity of his father, who may be either communist writer Frank Marshall Davis or ‘some Indonesian.'”
The Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has always been horribly tainted by its weird and extreme membership. But the departure of Roscoe Bartlett really hurt because he occasionally came off as a reasonable and kindly old man.
Another veteran member of the Cult has been Frank Gaffney. But in the last three years Gaffney has spent much more time convincing Tea Party legislators in red states that shariah law is coming to the United States.
Trent Franks had tried to keep the ball rolling on electromagnetic pulse doom defense.
But as notes the Journal:
Franks said he had been led to believe last session that his bill would be brought to the House floor for a vote. But he said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., let it die in committee. He said he has been unable to get an explanation from Upton.
They just can’t get no respect. Not even from their own, anymore.
North Koreans, apparently. More planning than went into the catastrophic remake of Red Dawn. Small chance they’ll get additional audience because of North Korea crazies in news.
Morgan Freeman, the pop culture face of presidential gravity.
Public figures and commentators are so routinely odious in modern American life that everyone learns to filter it out. It’s a defense mechanism for life in the plutocracy. However, occasionally you run across something so supremely stupid and hateful passed off as wisdom it makes your eyes water.
Task begins to rant about a government bailout of the sugar cane and sugar beets industry. Task immediately reveals he’s so ignorant on the subject of food ingredients that “sugar,” in this case, means everything sweet and fattening in the US diet. Which isn’t the case at although I’m not going to get into it.
However, what the pundits really want to get into is a rant about poor people and how fat they are.
The Daily Ticker video is here. Advance to about 2:30 to get to the part where Task and his companion go over the top in their scorn for the poor:
Task: Poor people are fat. For the first time in human history. It’s ridiculous.
It goes on for a bit like that, about how stupid it is for the government to keep sugar prices low because that makes it too easy for poor people to buy a lot of candy. They roll pictures of Hershey bars.
His partner, Lauren Lyster, then suggests by not bailing out the cane industry, we could have an “obesity tax.”
The whole bit is stunning in its ignorance and casual malice.
Now, I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and don’t eat much candy, ever. But in the baking ingredients aisle I find that the price of granulated sugar, either from cane or beets, for use in my tea, just about right.
And while I do not bake I know people who do. Baking cakes, and so on, is a way to make wholesome food — and I consider baked goods part of a decent diet, and that nothing would be served by having to pay more for sugar and seeing to it that less people are employed in the cane and sugar beets industry.
It would also have never occurred to me that it was a handout to poor people who are allegedly too fat in America because all they eat is candy and sweet junk. And that they should not have that because it is bad.
As I said above, it’s eye-watering in its mean spirit and idiotic quality, passed off as righteous anger over government interference in the market. But, unfortunately, I think it’s fair to say you wouldn’t have to go very far to find fellow citizens who believe it to be informed and right.
Poor people are the fattest, only in America, for the first time in history. We should stop making sugar cheap for them with taxpayer money and then they would have to eat apples or look more like those starving in Africa or beggars on the streets of Bangladesh. Or something.
He was just beaten soundly in an election. So he comes back with a budget plan just like the old rejected one, only a bit more cruel. Then he makes a Freudian slip, caught be everyone: “We’re not going to give up on destroying health care…”
Best Paul Ryan song, ever. Republican Jesus, the public crucified him and he rose from the dead four months later.
A bit over a week ago the mainstream newsmedia covered the release of a new report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center, one documenting an explosive rise in domestic extremist groups. One of the initiators is the presidency of Barack Obama and the persistent belief — now going on five years — that he is going to take away the guns.
The number of anti-government, far-right extremist groups has soared to record levels since 2008 and they are becoming increasingly militant, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It says the number of groups in the “Patriot” movement stood at 1,360 in 2012, up from 149 in 2008 when Barack Obama was first elected president, an increase of 813%. The report said the rise was driven by opposition to Obama and the “sputtering rage” over federal attempts at gun control …
“We are seeing a real and rising threat of domestic terrorism as the number of far-right anti-government groups continues to grow at an astounding pace,” said Mark Potok, SPLC senior fellow and author of the report. “It is critically important that the country take this threat seriously. The potential for deadly violence is real, and clearly rising.”
Potok said that the demographic factors driving the rise in such groups began before Obama became president – the census bureau predicts that whites will become a minority group in the US by 2043 – but have been fuelled by the changes in America he represents. The growth in extremism has been helped by the “successful exploitation over illegal immigration” and by anger over the gun control debate, he said.
Law enforcement officials have uncovered numerous terrorism conspiracies born in the militia subculture, including plots to spread poisonous ricin powder, to attack federal installations, and to murder federal judges and other government officials …
While I didn’t comment on it at the time, the report, entitled Challengers from the Sideline: Understanding America’s Violent Far Right, analyzed right wing domestic terrorism for contributing factors. The strongest correlator was the number of seats held in the House of Representatives by Republicans.
Simply, right wing violence escalates when their are more GOP Reps. The report reasoned this might be because those perpetrating right wing violence feel supported ideologically by Republicans in that body.
The other possibility, of course, is that the rhetoric emitted by the Republican Party in control of the House creates an environment in which some people feel empowered, or moved, to violence against the government.
The other contributing factor was legislation, specifically that having to do with gun control. The Brady Bill, or Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, signed into law in 1993 during the Clinton administrations, caused a spurt in militia growth and related right wing violence in that period. Two years later Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in the most lethal act of right wing domestic terrorism in this country’s history.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok told news reporters he “expected extremism to rise, as anger over gun control had become a ‘grassroots rebellion.’. He said that 20 states are considering laws that would aim to nullify federal gun control measures and 500 sheriffs mainly in western US, who say they will not enforce any such measures.”
The ricin plot, which I covered here as the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang, involved four old men who discussed plans to bomb federal buildings and disperse the poison, was a non-starter but rife with the type of language emitted by the insurrectionist right.
Two of the men pleaded guilty. Two remain to be tried on making a weapon of mass destruction. A bucket of castor beans in a shed was recovered by the US government as evidence, along with one of the old internet ricin recipes, uploaded into cyberspace now well over 20 years ago by a bored teenager.
Disclosure: I was consulted on the nature of the recipe because I’m the person who wrote most authoritatively on the subject during the war on terror years. This is when the newsmedia routinely spread the canard that ricin was easy to make simply by downloading instruction from the Internet, a stupid belief that persists to this day.
The recipe doesn’t make ricin. It makes degreased castor powder from castor seeds which contains some ricin, some or all of which may be degraded depending on the instructions actually followed.
No people have died as a result of attacks using ricin in the entire war on terror. And while al Qaeda has periodically evinced interest in using ricin, it has never done so. In fact, more white right-wing Americans have been arrested and jailed on wanting-to-make-ricin beefs than any other nationality. More specifically, it’s almost exclusively a WhiteManistan thing, where it originated a long time ago.
The Georgia case also illustrates the FBI does have a dragnet out for right wing terror plots, one that makes use of informants recruited to infiltrate potential domestic terror cells.
In slightly related news, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity issued a report about a week ago and almost nobody paid a lick of attention.
This is notable for the fact that the Center was regularly in the news with reports and predictions that catastrophic bioterrorism was imminent and easy to carry out during the salad days of the war on terror.
This was because the UPMC Center for Biosecurity was the house that Tara O’Toole built. When O’Toole left to take a position in the Department of Homeland Security, all the zing and mojo went with her.
As you’ve guessed, or knew, the UPMC Center for Biosecurity existed only to dispense shoeshine on the threat of bioterrorism.
Its most recent report, entitled When Good Food Goes Bad, was covered only by Food Safety News.
From Food Safety News:
From its headquarters on Baltimore harbor, the 15-year-old Center for Biosecurity of UPMC looks out on the historic Coast Guard Cutter Taney, the last ship afloat to have immediately fought back when Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941.
The way the Taney instantly turned its guns on the enemy is just the sort of reaction the U.S. needs to mount whenever and wherever there is an outbreak of foodborne illness, according to the Center’s new report “When good food goes bad??? …
The Biosecurity Center’s interest in foodborne illness outbreaks apparently stems from the 2010 “credible threat??? by Al-Qaeda terrorists to poison salad bars and buffets at hotels and restaurants over a single weekend, using ricin and cyanide. “U.S. officials cautioned that even in small amounts of these chemicals in food could cause serious harm,??? says the report.
That plot was not executed, but highlighted the problem. “Initially, it will be very difficult to distinguish deliberate contamination of the food supply from a naturally occurring outbreak,??? it says.
The Center for Biosecurity researchers who probably have never actually seen any real documents from terror cases on food plots using ricin (and cyanide) have only one citation for this in their report, a brief piece issued by CBS News back in 2010.
“Manuals and videos on jihadist websites explain how to easy it is to make both poisons,” informed CBS.
Perhaps they have also missed the facts that al Qaeda has been smashed and that, I’ll repeat, more white American men have been convicted for fiddling with castor beans than any other nationality.
And that no ricin plots in America have ever gone forward. In any case, the report is classic shoeshine work, stuff of no value to most Americans unless they’re in the homeland security business.
Most recently, the al Qaeda comic book Inspire, now at issue number ten, recommended jihadists start causing “road accidents” and setting fire to cars.
“We all agree the Kuffar chose the wrong path,” it reads. “Now it’s time for their vehicles to also leave the right path. Demolition Derby Style.
“The best timing for a ‘Causing Road Accident’ operation is during night hours, especially on Sunday night. Most of the Kuffar will be either drinking or showing off their driving talents to their friends. In addition to the poor visibility due to the scarcity of light (hmmm, hasn’t ever been to LA at night, obviously). Thus it is hard for your ambush tools to be noticed.”
Ingenious. What could they work out next? Perhaps urinating in ice machines at hotels and motels?
Last year, Inspire recommended setting forest fires. And six months earlier, running people over with a pickup truck armed with a snow plow.
They all worked well.
Anyway, the Center for Biosecurity report recommended the US government strengthen food surveillance.
“Fewer food safety inspections and an increased risk to consumers will result from the lack of a new 2013 budget from Congress and the upcoming across-the-board spending cuts, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said …” reads a recent news piece, also at CBS.
It should be noted that, so far, the sequester is happening but al Qaeda is not.
“[Hamburg] said most of the effects wouldn’t be felt for a while, and the agency won’t have to furlough workers … Still, she said, ‘We’re going to be struggling with how to really grapple with the cuts of sequestration … clearly we will be able to provide less of the oversight functions and we won’t be able to broaden our reach to new facilities either, so inevitably that increases risk.’ ”
New category, Shoeshine. The growing parts of the American economy are devoted to it, armies of upper middle class lickspittles employed as process workers and analysts in it. It had to happen.
From the wire, news that two of the biggest arms manufacturers in then world, Lockheed and Raytheon, are in the running to furnish a private army of cybersoldiers to the government.
Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are vying with telecommunications companies to defend banks and power grids from computer attacks, in a program that gives them access to classified U.S. government data on cyber threats.
President Barack Obama’s Feb. 12 cybersecurity executive order authorized the Department of Homeland Security to let new companies get the government intelligence. Obama and U.S. officials have said sharing classified threat data with companies is essential to help prevent cyber-attacks that could cause deaths oreconomic disruption …
Under the program, the companies are provided — free of charge — computer threat “signatures,??? such as timestamps and coding used in attacks, which have been obtained by the National Security Agency and other agencies. The companies can use this intelligence to strengthen cybersecurity services they sell to businesses that maintain critical infrastructure.
“The demand is there. I think the priority is there, and the threat is serious,??? Steve Hawkins, vice president of information and security solutions for Raytheon, said in an interview.
Cybersecurity Market
Defense contractors like Raytheon view cybersecurity as a growing business as Pentagon spending stalls or declines on more traditional military programs …
To defend against economic disruption. Savor that one.
The President can’t even get the minimum wage raised but there are always initiatives to give more to arms manufacturers, or all of our cyberdefenders, to stop alleged economic disruption.
It’s clear evidence, stuff only stupid people can ignore, that the US has a government and corporate national security complex that forces people into moral crisis.
It’s simple. If you work for this while the rest of the country continues to be hung out to dry, you’re part of the machinery of theft, not the opposite. Got it?
Yes, great idea of benefit to everyday Americans. Give information from the NSA, bought by taxpayers, to arms manufacturers who will sell it for profit to customers. It’s called corporate capture and it’s everywhere in the 2013 US, the model perfected when the government gave free money to too big to fail banks who then turned it around to lend to others at much higher rates of interest.
Well done, parasites! It’s good to be evil!
Believe me, a daily dose of contempt for cybersecurity shoeshiners is not nearly enough.
