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.
In addition to the philosophical differences with encouraging government funding for private companies, critics say the Department of Energy gave Solyndra favorable treatment in the loan approval process due to its tight relationship with administration officials.
They point out that one of the company’s main financial backers, billionaire George Kaiser, is also a big Democratic campaign donor.
Now the company’s bankruptcy has become a case study on an issue likely to gain increasing attention: Should the government be investing taxpayer dollars in promising — but risky — startup companies?
All of the mainstream media will play dumb. Propping up crappy firms with taxpayer dough! Heresy!
Lots of people will stupidly act like it’s rare, or should be.
They will conveniently ignore that one of the primary functions of the Department of Homeland Security, over the past decade, was to do the same thing. And for most of the time we were under GOP rule.
The taxpayer propped up hundreds, maybe thousands, of small businesses promising technology to fight the war on terror. Most of it either totally flopped or has never paid off in any big way.
WASHINGTON — A $36 million anti-terrorism program designed to detect bombs on airline passengers by shooting air blasts to dislodge explosive particles is being scuttled because the machines proved unreliable at airports.
The “puffer” machines — glass portals that passengers enter for checkpoint screening — are being removed after the Transportation Security Administration spent $6.2 million on maintenance since 2005. Removing them will cost nearly $1 million, TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said.
Problems emerged after the TSA bought 207 puffers for $30 million starting in 2004. Ninety-four were installed in 37 airports. The other 113 machines stayed in storage.
Dirt and humidity in airports led to frequent breakdowns, Payne said. The TSA has removed 60 puffers and will pull the rest but has no deadline. The puffers, costing $160,000 each, attempted to identify bomb residue on clothing. They were used as added screening on passengers who had gone through metal detectors.
Some of the machines had trouble detecting bombs, said Hasbrouck Miller, a vice president of puffer manufacturer Smiths Detection. “It was a torturous four years,” Miller said, describing repair efforts …
One can make the argument the only reason the company hasn’t gone out of business is because of continuous taxpayer funding courtesy of multiple federal agencies.
And dead Jack Murtha’s career was virtually defined by it during the big years of the war on terror. When he died, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity lost its government fixer and its effort to get a big bioterror defense vaccine production center slowly collapsed.
Over the weekend, from internal DD e-mail, the opine of one of our few public service security experts:
As I drove in this AM there was the “Threat Alert??? ( based on an uncorroborated report) that al Q would do a car or truck bomb attack in either NY or Wash DC.
I wouldn’t think that would be any great problem for anyone these days, but I will bet you a big bag of my very best marbles that it is spurious information and that nothing will happen.
An intelligence report this summer warned that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was seeking castor beans, the simple but deadly ingredient needed to make a quick and lethal dose of the poison ricin. One concern was that ricin might be used in a subway attack, combined with an explosion to disperse the deadly toxin through the closed tunnels of a subway system. This is a scenario the U.S. military has long feared, going back to the 1960s and 1970s, and the sarin gas attack in Japan’s subways in the 1990s showed its lethality.
[Incompetent. Ricin is not quick. Initial symptoms of ricin poisoning take a few hours to show up. Death from a lethal dose, depending on the amount, can take from one to three days.]
2. Radiological Bombs
The so-called dirty bomb has been an obsession of U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials for years, dating to 2002, when the FBI suspected an Illinois man named Jose Padilla of plotting such an attack. Padilla was ultimately convicted of other crimes. Still, officials recognize it would be fairly easy for a terror group to collect radiological waste from hospital machines overseas and package it with an explosive.
[Incompetent citation, again. Jose Padilla thought he could enrich uranium by swinging it in a bucket tied to a rope.]
5. Cyberterrorism
…With the help of a state sponsor well versed in cyberwarfare, a terror group could shut down parts of the U.S. electric grid, cause havoc with financial trades …
[The electrical grid and Wall Street memes, repeated in almost every story on cyberterror/cyberwar.]
“John Solomon is the editor of news and investigations for Newsweek and The Daily Beast,” reads the tagline.
Not that the bad guys have given up. Tens of thousands of our protectors were on full alert yesterday against a small number of Al Qaeda operatives who were said to be plotting an attack here or in Washington.
The possible weapons included a car bomb and a poison such as ricin. One informed law enforcement source said the terrorists had been trained to strike an easy “soft” target first with the hope of diverting protection away from a better defended “hard” target.
The number of people hired to search for and analyze threats exploded.
Today it’s a fact there there are a lot more people working in this capacity alone, paid for by the taxpayer, than there are actual members of al Qaeda worldwide …
Another result is that at the local level, nationwide, the belief has been embedded nationwide in many people, including those ostensibly involved in counter-terrorism, that al Qaeda men are everywhere, ready to spring from behind any bush to spray Americans with germs or poisons.
Here’s my ten year anniversary reminisce on the war on terror, one drawn from expert perspective. And it’s simple.
The bad guys won.
I don’t mean bin Laden or al Qaeda.
My view deals with the US mechanism, the security and threat assessment machine that was part of the post 9/11 Bush boom in the tools of war.
Today there’s no visible mechanism in the nation looking at things from the perspective of a devil’s advocate. There is nothing acting to put the breaks on a function where the only purpose is to find new enemies.
It hardened into this all things terror all the time half a decade ago.
Arms control agencies, any public information source that didn’t directly serve the war on terror by finding new threats, any threats, went silent, were marginalized or ceased to exist.
It’s a matter of economics and capitalism. There is no money in not feeding the fear.
We did this to ourselves. The worst parts in the paranoid reptile brain, convenient for a national business model based on a constant state of fear, were allowed to take over.
Over the years I’ve known a number of good people who did practice reason and criticism, individuals who fought against the making of terror stories and information into commodities, planted p.r. for political recognition and increased funding. If they went into the apparatus, and some did, they were silenced.
Purchase for service and work in the government destroyed all the value of formerly public critical thinking.
Of course, we still have it. It just has no place now.
From my experience, it’s useful to look back at how I got into looking at terrorism. The idea was to be rational. And that doesn’t seem too unreasonable even when printed today.
This occurred when I was contacted by British defense counsel in the infamous London ricin trial. I had been researching “recipes” for ricin and how and where they had circulation worldwide. I published on the web through GlobalSecurity.
And these recipes were going to be part of the trial. The prosecution’s case was initially aimed at linking a recipe found in England with other recipes found when the US overturned the Taliban and routed al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The reasoning was that it would prove a linkage and an operation that had been interrupted.
And I was familiar with all the original ricin recipes and where and when they had been published.
Kamel Bourgass’s jewelry tin of castor seeds, used to help grease the Iraq invasion. “The prosecuting authorities effectively [stood] accused of suborning justice to shore up support for an unjustifiable war,” wrote a columnist for The Telegraph in April of 2005.
Take a close look at that photo of a jewelry tin of castor seeds.
In September of 2002 until January of 2004, British anti-terrorist branch men were engaged in a dragnet for suspected terrorists in the north and east of London. In one operation on January 5, the plant poison ricin was claimed to have been found in an apartment above a pharmacy in a place called Wood Green. The news flashed around the world.
Tension was high and TIME International wrote in a story entitled “Poisonous Plot:” “Watching the police officers come and go, some of them in protective white suits and masks, and seeing the long hours they spent in the top-floor apartment above a local pharmacy, neighbors in North London’s multiracial Wood Green section knew that something big was up.”
Several suspected terrorists were arrested. One at Wood Green, others connected to a raid at the Finsbury Park mosque and one, Kamel Bourgass, a week later, in Manchester. Bourgass stabbed and killed a police officer in the Manchester raid. At the apartment in Wood Green — a “residue of ricin” was said to have been found. “A presumed al-Qaeda terror lab had been shut down.”
The residue of ricin eventually turned out to be a false positive, news suppressed until the trial of accused suspects in 2004. As for anything deadly — 22 castor seeds, most of them in the tin shown above, were the best that could be produced.
When I was first contacted by a representative of the defense counsel, document specialist/expert Duncan Campbell, the opinion was that a crew of terrorists bagged in the London raids were going to be sent over.
Most still believed there was some substance to Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council, a now totally discredited piece of theatre that ended his career. It was a show in which one of the government slides focused on a nefarious network allegedly linking al Qaeda in Iraq to plots in Europe.
Now — replace that ominous-looking and shadowy “UK Poison Cell” with the silly photo of a jewelry tin of castor seeds.
It’s impossible to take even half seriously as any basis for even one plank of an argument for taking the US into a disastrous war in Iraq. That it was used in such a way is criminal.
Nevertheless, that’s what our leaders did.
In England and before a jury, the prosecution’s terror case collapsed. There was no way to link a scrap of a ricin recipe found in England with material taken off al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The British recipe had been actually been copied from a server in California.
The British jury would convict only Kamel Bourgass. And he was already in prison for life. The ricin trial charges were only icing on the nasty cake.
The jury did not buy that the people in the dock with Bourgass were part of an al Qaeda poison ring. They were exonerated although the British government would continue to make things miserable for them in subsequent years. A trial of more men swept up in the original counter-terror operation was canceled. It had been predicated on the idea that a jury would find evidence of a poison ring and convict all men in the first trial.
I realized early that this would be of some news in the US.
The British government had embargoed the trial in the UK, but not here. So, under the rubric of Globalsecurity, American news agencies were approached.
No one would have it. So we published on site.
Then they started to call.
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post was perturbed. The information, he growled over the phone, put the paper in a difficult position. This meant having to scramble for confirming anonymous sources in England.
Harrumph! Such things disturb the digestion.
Somebody from 60 Minutes called. What did my sources in the government, the intelligence agencies, tell me? What did Colin Powell have to say?
That’s what I was asked. I didn’t have any sources in the government and intelligence agencies. Colin Powell? Surely, 60 Minutes had to be joking! I never heard from them again.
The mixed outcome dismayed U.S. counterterror specialists who were convinced that Bourgass and his four codefendants were in fact acting as part of a broader international terror plot …
“This is very disturbing …” [said a] a government consultant on international terror cases about the acquittals in the ricin-plot case. “These are dangerous people …
The [al Qaeda poison ring] news was too terrible and repeated too often to easily replace as common wisdom. Indeed, there will be many convinced that justice was not served, that a poison plot was foiled and that convictions would have been certain if only the right evidence had been presented and taken seriously. They will think that the case of Bourgass and others was a defeat in the global war on terror.
Others, however, will view it as a victory, an affirmation that specious intelligence, fear, stupidity and suspicions cannot forever trample on reality.
That hesitant optimism was unwarranted. Things were only going to get worse.
The number of people hired to search for and analyze threats exploded.
Today it’s a fact there there are a lot more people working in this capacity alone, paid for by the taxpayer, than there are actual members of al Qaeda worldwide.
And you can define the number of times in the last decade even one of them has come forward to offer public reason and perspective contrary to the usual mantra of everything being at threat at any time, simply by using the index finger and thumb to make a big zero.
That’s none in the ten years since 9/11.
This has resulted in very many bad things.
For example, at a micro level millions of dollars a year have been thrown away on not one, but two, experimental ricin vaccines for a decade. It’s been enough to support one pharmaceutical business and one government operation, the former of which has not brought one product to market in the time since 9/11.
Just multiply that kind of thing tens of thousands of times throughout the country.
Another result is that at the local level, nationwide, the belief has been embedded nationwide in many people, including those ostensibly involved in counter-terrorism, that al Qaeda men are everywhere, ready to spring from behind any bush to spray Americans with germs or poisons.
And yet another, the worst: The cynical monetization of all information and news on terrorism.
It’s always good business to have it for your new book’s publicity or your big news scoop. Or to manipulate it, leak it, massage and exaggerate it for political purpose, for improving the career or expansion of manpower and funding to search for always more threats.
Indeed, much of it has been written about here, at GlobalSecurity, and at other venues. Almost a decade’s worth of work on what now looks like historical documentation for the inexorable downward slope.
After bin Laden was killed there was a week of celebration. However,
what was the benefit? Seven days later it was back to more business as usual.
All the people who died ten years ago are not honored by this machine, this gigantic thought-destroying mechanism erected because of one very bad day. One wonders what some of them might say to us if they could have just one look at the way things are now.
What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. [The] atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.
A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.
“Predator loans, iPhones and drones … plus we got lotsa crazy people! Exactly the right song for today. Whether we like it or not. The ten years following 9/11 did not honor the people who died. I wonder what some would say if saw what the country became.
Update:
Frank at Pine View Farm comes up with a pic from a local ATM machine.
Nature, the UK pub for serious peer-reviewed science publication, has a brief overview of what the Department of Homeland Security has achieved in the last decade. (It comes in the news section of the mag.)
It won’t come as revelatory to readers that the verdict is much less than stellar.
The writer interviews Tara O’Toole, formerly the de facto leader of the US bioterror public/private sector defense industry.
A couple years ago she was tabbed by the Obama administration for service as an undersecretary at DHS for its science and research development ops. And yesterday she bore mention in the blog in connection with the debt crisis, austerity politics and national economic failure putting a crimp into financing for bioterror defense.
From Nature:
Ten years on it has become apparent the {Science and Technology Directorate of DHS] has seriously underachieved …
When Tara O’Toole listed 16 of the directorate’s most significant results in a memo to [the author] earlier this year, she named some decidedly low-powered accomplishments along with some significant ones in cybersecurity and power-grid security. The accomplishments included a new lightweight breathing apparatus for firefighters, the IronKey secure USB thumb drive that can destroy its data or prevent unauthorized access, a new scanner called MagViz that will allow passengers to carry water bottles through airport security; and new hardware for making power grids resilient against lightning strikes, solar storms and electromagnetic pulse attacks. Despite some major achievements, the list is somehow underwhelming …
At one point the article mentions DHS projects to screen for nuclear cargo smuggling resulted in the inflation of helium-3 prices, from $200/l
to ten times that amount in the space of a year. This had a shot-in-the-foot effect, “putting a strain on research budgets.”
Nature is here. Articles are available by subscription. (Hat tip to SA.)
Today, the Cult of EMP Crazy infiltrated the New York Times website via Greenwire, a “blog on energy and development.”
Written by Peter Behr, it has all the features common in an electromagnetic pulse crazy plant — sources almost exclusively from the cult lobby.
DD blog has dealt with most of the matters and individuals previously.
Today’s post agains swims under the common cover of protecting the grid from a solar flare, a point the Cult has cynically used to get itself into the news many many times.
Customarily, the Cult is only interested in using electromagnetic pulse doom stories as rationalizations for increased missile defense. The “unquiet angry sun” bits furnish them an extra argument used to publicize the standard agenda on a repeated basis.
The electric power industry is challenging an analysis of the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat that was an instrumental part of the 2004 report by the congressional EMP Commission. The commission focused on surges affecting the power grid from a high-altitude nuclear detonation. The same analysis, by prominent researcher John Kappenman and the California-based firm Metatech, also underpins warnings of widespread grid damage from geomagnetic currents triggered by a massive, once-in-a-century solar flare.
The electric power industry, not having been born yesterday, knows exactly where this is coming from — a small lobby with no real political power.
The researcher mentioned is not prominent but, rather, someone from a very small business which has been attached to the EMP lobby for a good long time.
Regular pieces on DD blog have made it impossible to avoid the many valid criticisms of the Cult of EMP Crazy.
The Greenwire blog mentions them, elliptically, giving the lobbyists their opportunities to respond with the usual lame dodges:
There may also be political and ideological differences over the EMP response.
The impetus for action began with concerns by some leading conservatives over the threat of EMP from a terrorist-launched missile. The EMP campaign has stirred opposition from some liberals who see a conservative interest in reviving a Reagan-era missile defense debate, some EMP action advocates say.
“Within the administration and among some of my Democratic friends, there is a willingness to close their eyes to anything that is nuclear generated,” said Rep. Trent Franks (R-N.M.), a leading member of the congressional EMP caucus. He said the nuclear scenario is “broader and more dangerous if it occurs” than the solar storm. “I am concerned that terrorists the world over are beginning to dial in to the grid’s vulnerability.”
The “congressional EMP caucus” has always been a small pest group, traditionally led by Roscoe Bartlett, now by Republican Trent Franks. Its members produce no legislation in any other areas of endeavor and it is “bipartisan” only in the sense that its GOP principals usually find one or two trivial Democrats willing to be their pets for cosmetic purposes.
Trent Franks is the very picture of a GOP extremist. He’s a birther and was also the politician who accepted Frank Gaffney’s “Team B” sharia-law-impurifying-the-American-justice-system report, something regarded as a bona fide piece of trash by all reasonable people.
The electromagnetic pulse lobby is defined by the company it keeps with many bad ideas. Traditionally, journalists — perhaps like Greenwire’s — don’t like to deal with the sprawling and odious crackpot nature of all of it.
However, there have been some exceptions. Notably, last week Frank Gaffney, and by association the EMP lobby, were made appropriate fools of on the Alyona show at RT.
Paradoxically, the Alyona Show was mentioning Gaffney in connection with a big Cult of EMP Crazy confab at the Heritage Foundation, one memeant to lobby for a National EMP Awareness Day. (We’ve dogged that previously, here.)
At the EMP Awreness Day “summit” cult members spoke about what they usually like to talk about — Iran attacking the US, terrorists attacking the US with a nuclear missile, or terrorists attacking a United States city with an electromagnetic pulse suitcase of doom.
The electromagnetic pulse suitcase story is a common one with the Cult. (There’s a picture here.)
Sometimes the electromagnetic pulse suitcase is souped up into a larger mobile device, said to be easy to get or in the hands of terrorists. The threat scenarios are always peddled by the small number of specialty businesses within the electromagnetic pulse doom lobby.
Pry, for today’s example, is another source in the Times story.
Anyway, as with lobbyists, the Cult of EMP Crazy is no exception, it is considered important to seed various claims into government reports, or — even better — to actually be able to author such reports.
This is where the Times’ Greenwire blog is dishonest.
The story intimates that the electric power industry (NERC) and the Energy Department were formerly “on the same page” concerning the electromagnetic pulse threat.
FERC, NERC and the Energy Department appeared to be on the same page. NERC and DOE were sponsors of a workshop on the EMP threat in November 2009. The workshop’s report (pdf), “High-Impact, Low-Frequency Event Risk to the North American Bulk Power System,” was issued in June 2010 by NERC and DOE.
It concluded, “Recent analysis by Metatech and Storm Analysis Consultants suggests … that the potential extremes of the geomagnetic threat environment may be much greater than previously anticipated.” The workshop’s EMP task force was chaired by Kappenman, a principal with Storm Analysis Consultants, and Metatech President William Radasky, and they were instrumental in writing that section of the 2010 report, industry officials say.
Common sense would seem to dictate that leaders of corporations ought not to be empowered by the US government to provide threat assessments which stand to directly enrich their interests.
But that’s how the US conducts business. From top to bottom, people read of agencies subverted by the businesses they are supposed to regulate.
And sometimes people then come to the conclusion that the US government is only a tool for the accelerated transfer of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of such mentioned businesses.
Which is a pity …
The latest example … comes to you courtesy of the Department of Energy and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (or NERC).
Reads the New York Times, courtesy of Matthew Wald:
A report just issued by the Energy Department and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as Nerc, an industry group that polices the power grid, lists three categories of threats to the grid: coordinated cyber- and physical attacks, pandemic disease and electromagnetic damage.
What Wald does not mention, or perhaps has failed to notice, is the “report??? has essentially been written by the small interests which make up the Cult of EMP Crazy, with government workers as their staff.
Three of the report’s authors are part of the bomb Iran/ballistic missile defense lobby. (Follow the link.)
These include John Kappenman — billed as being part of something called Storm Analysis for the report, William Radasky of Metatech and Michael Frankel of Roscoe Bartlett’s old EMP Commission.
For the past couple of years this group has been given short shrift. Under the wing of Roscoe Bartlett, members of the EMP Commission went before Congress repeatedly, only to be appropriately brushed off.
Compared to the businesses in the North American electrical power industry, these authors — members of the EMP lobby — are in very small and insignificant business operations. Metatech, for example, was able to slip into the NERC report a graphic on notional mobile electromagnetic pulse devices attacking the United States. (The report is here — see page 92.)
At one point, the Times’ Greenwire blog addresses the conflict of interest point raised here last year.
Kappenman said he agreed that the EMP threat should be thoroughly studied but that the complaint that his and Metatech’s analysis is not verifiable is off-base. “Essentially what NERC has decided to do is not allow commercial firms like mine to be a provider of this sort of simulation software. … The fact that I and others would like to be compensated for providing the code isn’t reason to think it is invalid.”
Kappenman said he also hears concerns that his studies are influenced by the opportunities to sell hardware solutions to protect the grid: “We should talk about that elephant in the room, I guess.” He said he has been involved in researching protection against EMP threats since the early 1990s, at EPRI’s request.
“I have never attempted to patent that technology. … It has been in public domain for 20 years. I have no control over it,” he said. While he is involved in commercial solutions to the EMP threat, if utilities begin to buy the safeguards, bigger firms will step into the picture “and will no doubt do a better job than I ever could in competing for the marketplace,” he added.
“We should talk about that elephant in the room, I guess,” concedes Kappenman. Who them proceeds not to actually talk about it, instead changing the subject by saying bigger companies might be able to compete better than his.
If DD were a betting man, he’d wager the electric power industry simply doesn’t want to have to put up with these small businesses. And it considers the electromagnetic pulse lobby a nuisance, one that — in the past — has been fond of hauling it before meetings chaired by Roscoe Bartlett. These are always meetings virtually no one attends but lobby members.
And so it made a tactical error when it originally allowed the EMP lobby to author a report, one then given weight by publication on its website.
Now it legitimately wishes to correct the matter.
NERC can do this by generating a new report, one separated from the EMP lobby and its small businesses. And it has valid arguments for doing so.
The power industry knows the score behind the scenes.
The electromagnetic pulse lobby has no real political power. And it owns an issue that not even half of the Republicans in the House really care about.
Brushing the kooks off once again is eminently doable.
To sow distrust and confusion among jihadists, the United States also uses a technique of “webspoofing” called “false band replacement,” where U.S. intelligence officers infiltrate networks to post their own materials.
The agencies have forged an al-Qaida “web watermark” that in effect “makes messages posted on these sites official,” Schmitt and Shanker wrote.
We invade jihadi websites! Really! Don’t laugh. They’re serious!
