05.12.11
Posted in War On Terror at 8:36 am by George Smith
The government, along with the media, will squeeze all the terror ichor possible out of the detritus of Osama bin Laden.
Last week I was briefly interviewed on whether or not I thought the government would have a hard time reading his shit. Not fucking likely, I thought.
It’s now baldly obvious bin Laden was a slack old man but one who, in isolation, still thought he meant quite a bit. And he was a pack rat.
The only impediment to reading through the stuff must be the sheer amount of it.
And if you had a button to push that would now immediately annihilate any person using the word “trove” on TV or in print in speaking about the man’s worldly remains, you’d use it.
Here’s the “trove” of “trove” usages.
And now there’s his journal, revealing all his plots. Or his wishful thinking.
From AP:
Until Navy SEALs killed him a week ago, bin Laden dispensed chilling advice to the leaders of al-Qaida groups from Yemen to London: Hit Los Angeles, not just New York, he wrote. Target trains as well as planes. If possible, strike on significant dates, such as the Fourth of July and the upcoming 10th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Above all, he urged, kill more Americans in a single attack, to drive them from the Arab world.
Bin Laden’s written words show that counterterrorist officials worldwide underestimated how key he remained to running the organization, shattering the conventional thinking that he had been reduced through isolation to being an inspirational figurehead, U.S. officials said Wednesday …
In one particularly macabre bit of mathematics, bin Laden’s writings show him musing over just how many Americans he must kill to force the U.S. to withdraw from the Arab world. He concludes that the smaller, scattered attacks since the 9/11 attacks had not been enough. He tells his disciples that only a body count of thousands, something on the scale of 9/11, would shift U.S. policy.
He also schemed about ways to sow political dissent in Washington and play political figures against one another …
It’s enough to make you laugh. One way of looking at is to view bin Laden’s musings as similar to Hitler moving around nonexistent armies on his maps down in the Fuhrer bunker just before the end.
And here’s another question: How does one write and publish something like “[he] schemed about ways to sow political dissent in Washington and play political figures against one another …” and maintain a straight face?
That’s the collective conduct of assholes — in this case, the usual anonymous leakers and journalists.
Very few can maintain over an entire decade. Bin Laden was no exception. It was probably never in the cards. One is curious if he ever questioned why his men weren’t more effective as the years came and went.
Meriting more laughter, the oh so busy man
The writings of Osama bin Laden, much in the news the last couple of days, amount to a single notebook of “10 or so pages” in his handwriting, a senior U.S. intelligence official says.
The singular impression of analysts, said the official: “He was down in the weeds … a micromanager.”
From MSNBC.
Where the well of counterfeit astonishment is seemingly bottomless.
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05.07.11
Posted in Crazy Weapons, War On Terror at 7:38 am by George Smith
As one might have expected, the US media lost its mind over the Osama bin Laden hit. It quickly dipped into fantasies clinging to thin reeds of evidence.
There’s been the special forces dog in his “doggles.”
There’s been the magic face recognition software, probably made by the same crap company that screwed up my CA driver license.
“Tech nailed Osama’s ID,” brag the witless.
Ignore all the stuff where the people left alive in the place, Osama’s wife or kids or helpers, said something like:”Yeah, that’s him. You got him. Now please don’t shoot me.”
Or any of the commandos: “Yes, that sure looks like him and it’s what all these papers and letters say.”
However, for bragging, invention and exaggeration nothing has topped the stealth helicopter stories, started by a fragment image passing for a photograph and Aviation Week magazine.
So maybe there was a non-stock helicopter in operation.
Here’s what the NY Times had to say on the 5th, one pretty standard example:
The assault team that killed Osama bin Laden sneaked up on his compound in radar-evading helicopters that had never been discussed publicly by the United States government, aviation analysts said Thursday.
The commandos blew up one of the helicopters after it was damaged in a hard landing, but news photographs of the surviving tail section reveal modifications to muffle noise and reduce the chances of detection by radar.
The stealth features, similar to those used on advanced fighter jets and bombers, help explain how two of the helicopters sped undetected through Pakistani air defenses before reaching the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad.
[The non-standard tail rotor] could have allowed operators to slow the rotor speed and reduce the familiar chop-chop sound that most helicopters make.
Now, let’s review the first news of the raid, from the Pakistani Twitter user in Abbottabad:
1. “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).”
2. “Go away helicopter – before I take out my giant swatter :-/”
3. “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S”
4. “Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicpoters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours???, so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad”
Didn’t read muffled or particularly stealthy.
Instead of stealth, one could easily argue for a certain lack of capability in the Pakistani military. Predator drones violate Pakistani airspace daily. Do they track all of them? Can they? And if radar sees drone or helicopters with similar radar signatures and/or flying the same speed, how — in Pakistan — do they distinguish between the two?
Anyway, the genes for myth-making are strong in the US.
They’re inextricably bound up with the American talent for fabrication and reflexive bragging, further embroidered by the reality that the US government is in the habit of not giving accurate accounts of anything in the last decade.
You can’t clear that up overnight.
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05.03.11
Posted in Permanent Fail, War On Terror at 12:42 pm by George Smith
If you live outside California you probably haven’t heard the tale of fail concerning the state’s new driver license.
It’s been going on in slow motion for months.
And it has resulted in massive backlogs of unfulfilled license renewals, people driving without valid licenses because they have no other choice, and the boondoggle of using a company — L-1 Identity Solutions — that’s cornered the market on US production of passports and driver licenses (it has 85 percent of the market for the latter.)
It is yet another example of the opposite of a free market. It is rather, a more standard story of a US company that has inexplicably soaked up all the business in a certain area, become a single source, and — as a result — left everyone greatly inconvenienced and without recourse while providing inferior service.
Since late last year L-1 Identity Solutions has had a series of failures, poorly described in the press, in manufacturing California’s new license.
The failures were so profound that at one point 80 percent of entire lots of license production were deemed defective.
The CA Department of Motor Vehicles processes 40,000 licenses a day.
So any screw up in the pipeline in a state this large immediately cascaded into a problem affecting everyone. As the renewals piled up, an awesome barrier of delay and inadequacy was created.
By February, the Sacramento Bee had reported a backlog of 850,000 waiting to receive new licenses. At that point, the state instituted an e-mail point on the DMV page so drivers could inquire as to the status of their renewal. The volume of queries crashed the system.
A friend of mine waited about a quarter of a year for her new license.
At one point she had to apply for a temporary through the DMV, a process that was also, naturally, backlogged.
As for myself, I’ve been waiting for almost three months for the new license. My current license expired almost two months ago. In the meantime, the state began issuing automatic temporaries to fill the gap. They are valid for ninety days. My temporary arrived this week.
However, as with everyone caught in this high-tech trap, there was a window in which I had no valid driver license.
Since almost all Californians over the age of twenty depend on their auto-transportation, this presented a huge number of drivers who, if pulled over, would have no valid paper. As a response, the state informed police officers to run such drivers, when they were stopped, through their computer system. If it returned information that the renewal fee had been sent in that acted as verification of license.
But this is now also the time of the TSA and needing a valid photo ID — like a license — to get on an airplane.
I’ve seen no statistics on people who just abandoned the idea of flying if caught by the license “outage,” so to speak.
However, I was one of them. My mother died in Pennsylvania when I had no valid photo driver’s license and no temporary. Flying to PA was out. So I missed the funeral. (In full disclosure, we weren’t close. But it would have been nice to have had the option to consider, not something unilaterally removed because of a screw-up at one of America’s taxpayer-funded homeland security companies.)
And I am also sure many other people, for any variety of reasons, just gave up on the idea of flying because of the license fiasco.
If you just Google L-1 Identity Solutions you’ll immediately see how corporate spam and astroturf has defeated the giant search engine. You can go through pages and pages of results and not find anything about L-1’s major fuck-up in California.
This is no accident. That’s how corporate America, at its best, works. It takes some effort to get past walls of obfuscation and even the mandarins of Google can’t fix it.
L-1 came into being after 9/11 and expanded explosively.
The firm’s local newspaper — the Westport Express — ran an extensive profile, explaining the history:
Most of us remember where we were and what we were doing on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
For Robert LaPenta, president, chairman and chief executive officer of Stamford-based L-1 Identity Solutions, that day’s terrorist attacks led to an epiphany about U.S. defense, and a company aimed at filling the huge, suddenly apparent, gaps.
“I watched the towers come down from my offices on 600 Third Ave.,” said LaPenta, who was president of a company he co-founded, L-3 Communications, at the time.
“It was that event that really was the genesis, the starting point of me beginning to think about a new business that ultimately spawned L-1,” he said in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Newspapers.
“I realized on that day that we spent $600 billion a year on aerospace, defense, ships, planes and weaponry, you name it,” LaPenta said. “None of those things really mattered when it came to what transpired on 9/11, where 20 terrorists with basically false driver’s licenses and a $25,000 budget were able to inflict the biggest attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor.”
……..
Homeland Security Today magazine named L-1 among its Rising 10 of 2009, a list of companies that promise to grow quickly in coming years because of either recent contracts or their overall positioning within expanding areas of homeland security.
Homeland security issues will fuel much of L-1’s future growth, LaPenta said, adding that about 80 percent to 90 percent of L-1’s business comes from public sector customers such as federal, state, local and foreign governments.
“Over the next three to four years, governments will still be bulk of the growth,” he said.
We were in Iraq and our products are now being deployed in Afghanistan,” LaPenta said. “They include jump kits that take biometric information and do matching to identify people in the field.”
“We are a prime provider of intelligence gathering, mission planning, mission analysis, cyber-security and imagery analysis and we do a lot of counterterrorism work for the agencies, which I cannot go into too much detail with,” he added.
LaPenta said the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the unsuccessful “Christmas bomber,” who tried to light a plastic explosive with a syringe sewn into his underwear on Northwest Flight 253 near Detroit, will ensure future demand from government customers.
It’s worth noting puckishly that L-1 Identity’s current mishandling of CA driver licenses would have certainly slowed any 9/11 bombers’ desires to quickly acquire them.
It’s also worth noting that the procedures used by the bombers would not have been foiled by the fancy new license which L-1 Identity has been failing to manufacture properly.
The 9/11 attackers’ strategy was procedural and based on system exploitation, not on high-tech stuff embedded in newfangled documents.
Just as the California license imbroglio was warming up late last year, this article on more of L-1’s gadgets hit Wired on-line, part of the Empire’s Dog Feces beat (aka security tech news to give the nerdy-boy crowd erections):
In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops use handheld devices to take iris scans and thumb prints off of detainees and put them in vast databases to distinguish insurgents from civilians. Now your local cops are getting in on the action.
L-1 Identity Solutions, a four-year-old company, makes the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection System (HIIDE), a mobile device that digitally records someone’s iris, fingerprint and facial characteristics “to create a comprehensive database on the enrolled subject.??? The tool, which has earned high marks in Iraq and Afghanistan, is marketed to cops, as a way to avoid taking suspects to booking stations,
In California, we’d still like our driver licenses.
Reported the Los Angeles Times, back in January (it’s now month five of 2011 and still not straightened out):
DMV Director George Valverde said the vendor, L-1 Identity Solutions, has struggled with color accuracy, the raised lettering and the positioning of images of California icons, including El Capitan in Yosemite and the Golden Gate Bridge. L-1 was the only bidder on the five-year, $63-million job, Valverde said.
The DMV issues more than 8.25 million driver’s licenses and ID cards annually. Some days the agency strives to distribute as many as 40,000 cards.
But when production on the new cards began, 80% of the cards in some daily batches contained errors. In such cases, Valverde said, the agency would return the entire batch to the vendor. Complicating matters, some days the vendor delivered no cards, and the agency quickly fell behind its usual pace.
…..
“Color [in the license] seems to be the biggest challenge,” Valverde said … Lisa Cradit, a spokeswoman for L-1, said the company’s policy was not to comment on issues related to customers.
Of course they wouldn’t. People here still want their licenses, though. And they’d probably wish ill on the firm if they knew who was responsible. Now they just know the thing has been a major pain-in-the-ass.
Thanks to one national security infrastructure company of scumbags.
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05.02.11
Posted in War On Terror at 12:26 pm by George Smith
“Sods, this would happen just before Virgin Media was set to lay cable in the street” — anonymous commenter
Finding the bin Laden compound through Google Maps provided a momentary diversion.
This link goes right to it.
If you want to try finding it from scratch — click here.
Then click on the “did you mean?” link. (My spelling mistake.)
Zoom until you start seeing street, road and facility names. Skew the map northwest.
The compound is by itself in the fields south of the Kakul Road.
That puts it about five hundred yards almost due south the Bilal Town map marker and slightly northwest of two larger white buildings on a small generally east-west through road it shares with them.
Colin Powell, in yet another feeble attempt to redeem himself, on CNN to assert the Pakistanis must have known. Well, duh.
“You are certain to get the worst of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person,” said Powell at some motivational seminar after his rep was trashed.
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Posted in War On Terror at 8:16 am by George Smith
Paraphrased from Rolf Harris. Seems as good a happy song as any to note the death of Osama bin Laden.
Some notes and comments, taken from the news:
“I don’t know if it will make us safer, but it definitely sends a message to terrorists worldwide,??? said Stacey Betsalel, standing in Times Square with her husband, exchanging high fives. “They will be caught and they will have to pay for their actions. You can’t mess with the United States for very long and get away with it.???
From the NY Times. Open mouth, insert foot. No, it took just under ten years. Curb the reflexive tendency toward bragging.
This really is one of those moments when there are no red states or blue states, just United States; no MoveOn progressives or Tea Party conservatives, just Americans. Triumphalism and unapologetic patriotism are in order. We got him.
From Eugene Robinson, at the Post.
Triumphalism coupled with kumbaya. Shakes head.
Prior to this missive, Gene Robinson was the guy you saw on Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell or Rachel Maddow everyday, grinning and laughing his way through every bit of terrible news from the republic. “Ha-ha-ha!” — the absurdity of it all. That summarizes Gene on the tube.
From ABC news, a segment showing the blood-spattered dilapidated room where bin Laden, or someone, met his end. You have to endure a one minute commercial first, not allowing any advertising potential to go to waste, this one for skin medicine.
A dog barks repeatedly as the camera pans the room. Finally, we see medications and a roll of tape on a shelf.
Mansion? Not even by Pasadena standards. Pretty feeble and very grim if the photo of the exterior is accurate.
Some thoughts:
1. That the operation was completed inside 40 minutes without loss indicates bin Laden’s guard was neither particularly capable, fearsome or fanatical. They came, they saw, they snuffed him and destroyed a helicopter that malfunctioned. Perhaps ten years of attrition left bin Laden’s terror force as eaten by moths as the domestic non-military side of the US.
2. No one with any sense should believe Pakistan’s intelligence service didn’t know bin Laden was in Abottabad.
3. After ten years, no WMD attacks, despite bin Laden and al Qaeda’s great desire for them. His death doesn’t make the acquisition of capability more likely. Rather, even less.
4. If you’re part of the mostly inept cadre of al Qaeda men remaining, it’s going to be increasingly hard to get up in the morning to go to work. Particularly if you think about this one too much.
5. One of the reasons Pakistan was a tourist attraction for angry young Muslim men wishing to train as bombers is gone. If you’ve no hope of seeing the great leader, or of even hearing his words through a proxy before being captured or killed in operations, how enthusiastic are you going to be about going to camp now, really?
It’s just going through the motions.
6. Throwing him in the ocean for the crabs was just the right thing. Bravo for thinking of it! Bin Laden’s watery burial guarantees he won’t furnish a jihadi facsimile of the grave of Jim Morrison.
7. The President I voted for gets a genuine Mission Accomplished moment, not a fake one.
8. Violating Pakistan’s sovereignty is good.
9. Pasadena was silent last night. No car horns, no obvious drunks, no Tea Party flags outside the town center.
No buffoon rally.
Made me glad to live here.
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03.07.11
Posted in Phlogiston, Predator State, War On Terror at 2:36 pm by George Smith
Last week Matt Taibbi’s on-line column at Rolling Stone ran the second installment in his Supreme Court for Assholes. Taibbi and selected friends form a court and then adjudicate whether or not someone in the news is an asshole. And then, if dubbed so, they’re given a score on a relative scale of assholery.
Surprisingly, the homeland security industry came in for a judgment.
For me, that’s an easy call. Everyone mentioned in natsec stories on this blog over the last few years is an asshole.
For instance, the biggest asshole last year was Michael McConnell of Booz Allen & Hamilton, determined by the number of times he was in the media rigging the argument on cyberwar for the profit of his company. Roscoe Bartlett and the Heritage Foundation were probably in a dead heat for second.
Taibbi and his Supreme Court for Assholes judged Airline Travelers vs. Lobbyists to the TSA.
It’s here.
It reads:
Court was asked:
1) If you lobby the government to force taxpayers to buy a useless product at great expense [in this case the Rapiscan whole body scanner], are you automatically an asshole?
2) If you take advantage of and/or stoke widespread cultural fears to make money via government contracting, are you an asshole?
THE RULING
The court voted 7-2 in favor of assholedom on the first question. The dissenting votes were Sirota and myself. I was with David here, and we both bought the Lieutenant Calley/Nuremberg defense – see his dissenting opinion below.
On the second question, the court voted 8-1, with Sirota the only dissenter. To me, stoking public fear to make money is inexcusable even in a “just-following-orders??? situation …
Sirota’s dissent went as follows: “Ruling these kind of people as all assholes is too broad a ruling, because the Assholeocracy legally forces private economic actors to think solely of their profits – and nothing more. That’s their legal and fiduciary responsibility, consequences be damned. Many of them might individually be assholes, but as a blanket rule, you can’t say they are all automatically assholes simply because they work within the ubiquitous Assholeocracy.???
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02.23.11
Posted in Permanent Fail, War On Terror at 9:40 am by George Smith
It’s been my take that the US government, as well as the military, can be very gullible when it comes to the claims of terror-sniffing capabilities from the private sector.
A recent story in the New York Times is a case in point.
It reads:
For eight years, government officials turned to Dennis Montgomery, a California computer programmer, for eye-popping technology that he said could catch terrorists. Now, federal officials want nothing to do with him and are going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his dealings with Washington stay secret.
Read the story. And you’ll find the claims made by the developer are frankly unbelievable. More unbelievable is that anyone accepted them, even to the point of the Bush administration going on alert and canceling international flights because of warnings, by this man, on non-existent plots.
It’s humiliating, confidence-breaking stuff and it’s obvious why all parties involved want to keep it a secret.
There has always been a paranoia associated with Arab news agencies. But the news that US authorities thought al Jazeera was hiding terror messaging in its crawl bar, messaging so cleverly hidden only this man and his vaporware software could see it is crushing.
It also illustrates an absolute lack of critical thinking coupled with a child-like belief in magical solutions.
Also revealed — the fact that once you get into the inner circles of anti-terror contracting, you seem to be able to get away with telling people just about anything, even in the complete absence of persuasive evidence. Other than some made-up dog-and-pony show.
The New York Times story is here.
Hat tip to Secrecy blog for linking it.
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02.22.11
Posted in Cyberterrorism, Extremism, War On Terror at 1:40 pm by George Smith
The e-mail dump from HBGary Federal, carried out by the Anonymous hacking group, has most famously exposed corporate plots to attack and discredit WikiLeaks, Glenn Greenwald and ThinkProgress.
Perhaps less publicized was Ars Technica’s story on the corporate development of malware for the US government.
The publication introduces the story:
On November 16, 2009, Greg Hoglund, a cofounder of computer security firm HBGary, sent an e-mail to two colleagues. The message came with an attachment, a Microsoft Word file called AL_QAEDA.doc, which had been further compressed and password protected for safety. Its contents were dangerous.
“I got this word doc linked off a dangler site for Al Qaeda peeps,” wrote Hoglund. “I think it has a US govvy payload buried inside. Would be neat to [analyze] it and see what it’s about. DONT open it unless in a [virtual machine] obviously… DONT let it FONE HOME unless you want black suits landing on your front acre. :-)”
The attached document, which is in English, begins: “LESSON SIXTEEN: ASSASSINATIONS USING POISONS AND COLD STEEL (UK/BM-154 TRANSLATION).”
It purports to be an Al-Qaeda document on dispatching one’s enemies with knives (try “the area directly above the genitals”), with ropes (“Choking… there is no other area besides the neck”), with blunt objects (“Top of the stomach, with the end of the stick.”), and with hands (“Poking the fingers into one or both eyes and gouging them.”).
But the poison recipes, for ricin and other assorted horrific bioweapons, are the main draw. One, purposefully made from a specific combination of spoiled food, requires “about two spoonfuls of fresh excrement.” The document praises the effectiveness of the resulting poison: “During the time of the destroyer, Jamal Abdul Nasser, someone who was being severely tortured in prison (he had no connection with Islam), ate some feces after losing sanity from the severity of the torture. A few hours after he ate the feces, he was found dead.”
It immediately caught DD’s eye because al_Qaeda.doc has been jihadi sucker bait for about a decade.
It’s a well-known fragment taken from the old Manual of Afghan Jihad, a copy originally seized from an old member of the Taliban in England and subsequently typed by the US and British government into a number of similar forms, and presented over the course of the war on terror as evidence at a number of terror trials.
A larger form of it, sans the poisons recipes, was even sequestered on a White House server during the Bush administration, part of an unintentionally hilarious argument made by that president that al Qaeda used torture but that the US did not.
I put the same fragment on the old DD blog years ago in connection with ongoing discussions on these matters, most notably because it was connected with the infamous London ricin trial and the resulting verdict, a time span between 2005-2006.
It is here.
Since it has been an object of keen interest, it’s no surprise the US government might use it in an archive as bait to pass malicious rootkit software.
However, it should be noted that, over the years, it is not just the random wanna-be jihadis and terrorists who have been attracted to it. Even seeding it onto a “dangler site for jihadi peeps” probably guaranteed that not just “bad guys” would get it.
In fact, there has long been an array of US private sector intel businesses, not necessarily adept at computer security and defending themselves from malware, who scour such sites for these things. So they can sell them to their clients. Or back to the US government.
It’s also worth mentioning that the poison-making recipes in it are rubbish.
The “two spoonfuls of excrement” formula is basically the old crap recipe for botox, first published on the fringes of the neo-Nazi survivalist right in the US in the Eighties, specifically in Maxwell Hutchkinson’s “The Poisoner’s Handbook.”
The definitive story on that, along with screen snapshots and pictures, is here.
The recipe for ricin, actually just a procedure for pounding and degreasing castor seeds, originally stems from Kurt Saxon’s Poor Man’s James Bond.
“According to Hoglund, the recipes came with a side dish, a specially crafted piece of malware meant to infect Al-Qaeda computers,” reported Ars Technica.
“Is the US government in the position of deploying the hacker’s darkest tools—rootkits, computer viruses, trojan horses, and the like? Of course it is, and Hoglund was well-positioned to know just how common the practice had become. Indeed, he and his company helped to develop these electronic weapons.
“Thanks to a cache of HBGary e-mails leaked by the hacker collective Anonymous, we have at least a small glimpse through a dirty window into the process by which tax dollars enter the military-industrial complex and emerge as malware.”
The rest of the Ars Technica story is here.
(Thanks to RMS for the tip.)
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02.18.11
Posted in War On Terror at 10:02 am by George Smith
HBO’s Battle for Marjah documentary is not worth your time.
That is, most already know the war in Afghanistan can’t be won. But that there is no political will to end it.
As a metaphor for that, the documentary is fine.
The doc follows the Marines of Bravo company as part of the assault on Marjah in Helmand province. For the most part, the Taliban are an elusive force. They don’t engage Bravo company in any setpiece knock-down, drag out battles, fights they would certainly lose due to much inferior firepower.
Instead, the Marines of Bravo are cut off — although it doesn’t seem like much of an inconvenience. And eventually Marjah is largely secured.
However, the locals obviously do no care for the Marines. The feeling is mutual.
The “Afghan army” — and I use asterisks because that’s what’s deserved — deploys with the Marines into Marjah. And although there is talk about how they’re credible fighters, on video they look like an inept assortment of reluctant shrimps and weaklings. At one point a few Marines from Bravo curse a group of them, literally having to kick them in the ass and shove them in order to get the Afghans through a doorway into a compound being cleared.
They’re patently worthless as soldiers. Many of the Marines appear to view them with disgust and contempt.
Eventually the Taliban wind up back in the town anyway.
Afghanistan is a hopeless place. Marjah will reinforce what you already know. Because of the nature of the lesson it is not very watchable. Again — not recommended — and not because of any fault with the Marine Corps or the filmmaker.
Another review is here.
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02.10.11
Posted in Imminent Catastrophe, Stumble and Fail, War On Terror at 3:45 pm by George Smith
One problem WikiLeaks has run afoul of in dealing with dribbling cables out through the media is distortion.
Some of its partners have things other then pure enlightenment in mind when they write stories on newly released cables. Like fame and fortune.
And because WikiLeaks is difficult to search directly onsite, readers are left with either taking what’s printed in the media for granted. Or spending a lot of time sifting through originals, with little guidance available, at WikiLeaks.
DD assumes, perhaps wrongly, that this was never Julian Assange’s intent.
The point of WikiLeaks is, obviously, to shed light. Not to provide more of the same old horse shit.
Which is what a recent story run by its new media partner, The Telegraph, has engaged in:
The publication of a carefully distorted piece, based on WikiLeaks cables, to cast the same type of impression one has been handed by the US government during the war on terror.
A few samples from it and the fallout as other newspapers and blogs rushed to play catch-up:
After sourcing nuclear materials and recruiting rogue scientists to build “dirty??? bombs, Al Qaeda is on the brink of producing radioactive weapons, as disclosed by leaked diplomatic documents.
The Vancouver Sun reports that, “a leading atomic regulator has privately warned that the world stands on the brink of a ‘nuclear 9/11.’ Security briefings suggest that jihadi groups are also close to producing ‘workable and efficient’ biological and chemical weapons that could kill thousands if unleashed in attacks on the West.???
The Daily Telegraph of London obtained thousands of classified American cables originating from Wikileaks that detailed the global struggle to halt the spread of weapons-grade nuclear, chemical and biological material around the world.
According to the Vancouver Sun, “at a Nato meeting in January 2009, security chiefs briefed member states that al-Qaeda was plotting a program of ‘dirty radioactive IEDS,’ makeshift nuclear roadside bombs that could be used against British troops in Afghanistan.??? — Dallas blog
=======
In November 2007, the US embassy in London received a telephone call from a British deep-sea salvage merchant based in Sheffield, who claimed that his business associates in the Philippines had found six uranium “bricks??? at the site of an underwater wreck. The uranium had formerly belonged the US. The merchant provided nine photographs of the bricks, which he said his associates wanted to sell for a profit. It is not clear whether diplomats agreed to the purchase. — The Telegraph
======
Airport security staff are being urged to examine “children’s articles??? after US intelligence concluded that terrorists were plotting to fill them with explosive chemicals.
The threat was disclosed at a meeting in Spain between Janet Napolitano, the US Secretary of Homeland Security, and European ministers in January 2010.
Ministers said that planes remained the “priority target??? for al-Qaeda.
According to the cable, Thomas de Maizičre, the German interior minister, described “recent threat information that noted the possibility of terrorists using children’s articles to introduce bombs into airplanes??? — The Telegraph, in “WikiLeaks: terrorists plan to use teddy bear bombs to blow up planes”
The obvious purpose of The Telegraph’s release of WikiLeaks material is sensationalism — the creation of the feeling that menace lurks everywhere and that al Qaeda is hatching new plots.
However, the newspaper’s website is a thicket of misleading information and come-ons to cables, promises and links that lead virtually nowhere except to the newspaper’s own material.
For example, after serially reading through WikiLeaks itself, consulting a searchable database tied to keywords for WikiLeaks here, and using the Telegraph’s own portal purported to search its cables, I could find nothing on teddy bear bomb plots.
This does not mean it doesn’t exist. Maybe I couldn’t find what was obvious. And al Qaeda seems to have such a high problem with unreliability, quality of human capital and achievement these days, any feverish dream could be possible, I guess.
However, the result does smell really bad when taken within the context of everything else DD could find.
If one has a sensational story to be pushed around the world there is a responsibility to make it as transparent as possible. Not just the opposite.
And it was my understanding that this was one of the things WikiLeaks was ostensibly about: The presentation of material in such a way that it could not be twisted and distorted by the usual players.
Which is what has transpired with the Telegraph’s use of WikiLeaks.
The Telegraph’s coverage aggressively creates the impression of terror capabilities when there is no actual proof they exist.
It scavenges what is often old news, or just wrong information, in an effort devoted to weaving trivia, random appearances of radioactive scrap — waste of an industrialized world, unexplained events and outright hoaxes on nuclear smuggling into a tapestry that indicates growing danger.
After using Cablesearch and WikiLeaks itself, DD could find very little really interesting postings on nuclear smuggling.
Most of it is rumors and crap, revealing only that the US government is bent on chasing around everything that might have to do with nuclear smuggling worldwide, even rumors and crap.
There is a report from Kabul on alleged materials, “2 bottles of uranium,” seized from a native. Later, it turns out to be gun-cleaning fluid, if I’m reading the thicket of cables correctly.
There is an unreliable hoaxer in Bujumbura in 2007, peddling red mercury and other materials, a scam that’s been around as long as people have been worried about nuclear proliferation.
It reads, in part:
ALLEGED NUCLEAR SMUGGLING INCIDENT IN BUJUMBURA,
DATE 2007-06-27 16:04:00
CLASSIFICATION SECRET
ORIGIN Embassy Bujumbura
TEXT S E C R E T BUJUMBURA 000479
The XXXXXXXXXXXX men indicated that there were 14 items found in the concrete bunker. All items have marking and labels indicating that they were produced in Belgium. The subjects were unable to spell the names of some of the items properly and did not know what the other items were, thus some of the spelling of the items are phonetic.
-Uranium, 30kg, powder form. The men did not know if the uranium was weapon-usable fissile material, highly enriched uranium, what the percentage of uranium-235 isotope or other isotopes were, or how its content was determined. -1 booklet describing the Uranium -Brommerck, 2,500g -Red Brommerk, 12kg -Red mercury, 6kg -Cocaine, liquid form
¶4. (C/NF) When asked what they intended to do with the items the subjects stated that they brought a vial of the Brommerck, to Bujumbura from the Congo. They planned on selling it to get enough money to transport the Uranium to Bujumbura upon securing a buyer. They also stated that they had not approached anyone else with this information. Their motive for approaching the American Embassy was that they did not want these items to fall into the wrong hands, specifically mentioning that they did not want Muslims to possess the items. When asked why they did not notify the Congolese authorities the subjects stated that they were afraid that the corrupt Congolese police would steal the items and sell it themselves. When asked why they approached the American Embassy in Bujumbura instead of the embassy or Consulate in the Congo they stated that the embassy in Bujumbura is much closer.
¶5. (C/NF) The ARSO asked the men to provide detailed photos of the items and their labels, especially the Uranium. The subjects agreed to provide photographs and additional information on all items at a later date. They indicated that they could produce a sample of the brommerck, upon request. The ARSO declined, but noticed that the subjects were pushing for a sale of the sample of brommerck,. The ARSO has the contact information of XXXXXXXXXXXX and is currently waiting to receive further photographic information from the subjects.
¶6. (C/NF) ARSO assessment: This case fits the profile of typical scams involving nuclear smuggling originating from the eastern DRC. ARSO considers this case to be a non-credible case of nuclear smuggling.
“Terrorist acquisition of WMD was the next topic of major concern. Although there was a limited assessed capability for al-Qaeda and other groups to acquire WMD, the intent was clearly present, and there were ongoing credible reports of attempts to recruit the needed expertise. A ‘dirty’ RADIOLOGICAL IED program was assessed to be under active consideration by al-Qaeda,” reads a cable here.
It’s one paragraph of very old rumint, trash, from a 2009 cable.
The Telegraph has used it to help resurrect an al Qaeda dirty bomb plot, one that probably doesn’t exist except on the terrorist organization’s wish lists.
There is a Czech incident in 2007 where depleted uranium is passed off as highly enriched uranium, apparently part of another criminal business scam.
And there are “bricks” of something in the ocean off the Philippines.
These and others, taken together without a newspaper purposely futzing them up for purposes of titillation, don’t describe anything but a random world. One where the US is obsessed with any information about potentials for nuclear terrorism.
In one sense, this is reassuring.
In another, it reveals a criminal underground of unreliable people out to make a quick buck who also know it.
WikiLeaks had to partner with newspapers like the New York Times and the Guardian for maximum impact. As these relationships fell apart, one was made with The Telegraph.
Subsequently, all three newspapers, as well as Der Spiegel, have monetized WikiLeaks.
In the process, particularly with the Telegraph’s recent news stories, the result has been to make things less clear than they were previously, to create smoke where there is no fire.
ph2dot1 was on this on February 2, in an eminently vulgar manner, declaring:
“[What] a total load of codswallop!”
And he didn’t even have to go to the trouble of using Cablesearch.
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