“How can the US stop an insider with an agenda?” was the headline on one of the more insipid articles on WikiLeads today — courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.
The newspaper tasked reporter Ken Dilanian with finding out.
Dilanian went and dug up Pieter Zatko, who is now in charge of something fierce called “Cyber Insider Threat program” at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The newspaper relates that Zatko’s involved in developing an app to detect the next Bradley Mannings but that it is “years from producing deployable solutions because the technology is in its infancy.”
As everyone knows, Julian Assange deployed the more well known and used app, so to speak, known as WikiLeaks.
“The Cyber Insider Threat program … will award grants to companies that propose ways of detecting improper activity by users … It is aimed at finding, for example, a network of corrupt employees …” adds the newspaper.
Only the people who drive and furnish WikiLeaks do not view themselves as corrupt. And the very nature of there motivation is a phenomenon that is now embedded socially, presenting problems which cannot be handled by devices.
Any technology that serves them is developing and being fielded more quickly than countermeasures can be mounted.
And what one thinks of Bradley Manning or Julian Assange depends on where you stand.
And what does DARPA work on these days? The things it brags about?
Not such innovative or world-shaking stuff.
EXACTO, a smart guided bullet for sniper teams, more funding for research and development in a variety of military robot assassins.
Its bid description for Persistant Close Air Support is catchy: “Key improvements are a positively controlled kill chain, digitally connected equipment for the Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) … ”
Here’s another coming innovation: “DARPA\TTO announces Phase I of the ArcLight program to significantly advance enabling technologies for high speed, long range strike weapons. ArcLight is a demonstration program to design, build and flight test a boost/glide vehicle capable of carrying a 100-200 pound payload over a 2,000 nautical miles range in approximately 30 minutes.”
Better, faster guided missiles.
Earlier this year, DARPA’s director — Regina E. Dugan, testified before Congress on innovation at her agency.
Mostly, it was about more and more weapons, sometimes comically so.
DARPA wanted to make the sky black with unmanned aerial vehicles, it was implied at one point.
The country, Dugan noted, had lost much of its manufacturing base and so DARPA believed that to “innovate” want has “to make,” to — in other words, return to manufacturing again.
Manufacture what? More weapons, of course. And better prosthetic limbs for when yours have been blown off by the other guy’s weapons.
Over the years, this has led to a falling out with America’s research universities. And a look at many of DARPA’s contractors confirms it’s top heavy with US arms makers and defense contractors.
Even Dugan’s testimony showed a lack of vision.
She was delighted by an app called Trapster, something that informs users on how to steer clear of speed traps. She also imagined that a Google map app had made North Korea transparent. In an alternate universe, apparently.
That’s some progress. Like thinking that if only everyone could write something like Jerk In a Box or Harmonica, such engine of invention would lead to a new industrial revolution.
DARPA, Dugan said, wanted to also aid science education at the public school level in the country. And to do this, DARPA solicited ideas from defense contractors.
One of them, unnamed, came up with — get ready, it’s great — Box O’ Radar.
Box O’ Radar, Dugan said, was “a kit for teachers to give students hands-on experience with radar systems.”
Yes, you can’t start training students how to man Lockheed Martin aerial and naval defense systems too early.
Because Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, comes from the hacker underground, its actions often look taken from the POV of a desire to expose stuff just for the sake of exposing it.
This was always part of the mindset of the hacker fraternity.
And it really wasn’t of tantamount importance to consider fine ramifications. So any tonnage of quote from the US government on how security was about to be greatly harmed — true, disingenuous, sincere or evil — was never going to be an impediment to action.
Wikileaks is proof of adherence to the old slogan favored by hackers: Information wants to be free.
And Bradley Manning — because he was vain and kept poor company, the result of which was his being turned over — doesn’t seem much of a Daniel Ellsberg.
There is a perceptible element of wanting to be famous, a not uncommon trait. And so the young man apparently vacuumed up everything at his disposal. This everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink approach has certainly worked, creating a great sensation, even when most of the material is gossip — State Department employees and foreign leaders being just how you might expect.
Because of what we have come to — the US frequently considered a bad actor — the Dept. of Defense and the State Department, the entire foreign face of the US government, has a problem it cannot solve. Its exposure is thought by lots of people to be well deserved, come-uppance because it has been on the wrong side of so many issues in recent history and been proven unaccountable.
Thus, there is now no defense that can be mounted against the swarm of those willing to perpetrate a Wikileaks-type operation.
It stands to reason that going forward there will always be at least one person like Bradley Manning in the service of the US government or military. Or even a couple.
Not someone who will just blow the whistle or leak a couple things of critical interest.
But someone who will mindlessly divulge everything they can get their hands on. Good, bad or indifferent — even material they could not humanly have taken the time to read and understand.
It is not so remarkable that Bradley Manning copied a staggering volume of material.
What’s remarkable is the collision of technology, an idiotically official American process of universally networking everything and labeling it secret — whether antagonistic, stupefying, mundane, understandably human or legitimately so, and someone like Manning, one person of small means who spills the beans. And then that absolutely nothing changes until the next mega-release and the cycle continues.
The act of disclosure has turned into an exercise in a type of extremism, a reaction — often unthinking — to what we are now. That’s the way it is.
And it’s impossible to secure against. Now that Wikileaks is an outlet the problem cannot be remedied from such a standpoint.
Does it merit the play-acting of someone like Hillary Clinton, asserting that it tears at the fabric of responsible government one moment, making a joke referral to what’s said about her behind closed doors, the next? No.
What passes for responsible government now? Who in the glass house is going to throw the first stone?
Chalmers Johnson might have had something interesting to say on the matter and its relationship to the maintenance of a worldwide empire. But we can’t ask him because he died.
At the Federation of American Scientists’ Secrecy blog, Steve Aftergood — who has regularly been critical of Wikileaks — had this to say, yesterday:
The Wikileaks project seems to be, more than anything else, an assault on secrecy. If Wikileaks were most concerned about whistleblowing, it would focus on revealing corruption. If it were concerned with historical truth, it would emphasize the discovery of verifiably true facts. If it were anti-war, it would safeguard, not disrupt, the conduct of diplomatic communications. But instead, what Wikileaks has done is to publish a vast potpourri of records — dazzling, revelatory, true, questionable, embarrassing, or routine — whose only common feature is that they are classified or otherwise restricted.
This may be understood as a reaction to a real problem, namely the fact that by all accounts, the scope of government secrecy in the U.S. (not to mention other countries) has exceeded rational boundaries. Disabling secrecy in the name of transparency would be a sensible goal — if it were true that all secrecy is wrong. But if there is a legitimate role for secrecy in military operations, in intelligence gathering or in diplomatic negotiations, as seems self-evident, then a different approach is called for.
“It’s impossible to say whether the race to fix the classification system can be won through our kind of advocacy from the outside and by enlightened self-interest within government,” concludes Aftergood. “Before that happens, classification itself could be rendered moot and ineffective by leaks, abuse or internal collapse. Or, in a reflexive response to continuing leaks, officials might seek to expand the scope of secrecy rather than focusing it narrowly, while increasing penalties for unauthorized disclosures.”
To wit, it is not at clear yet that Wikileaks is a universal solvent. And Aftergood, over all, is singularly positioned to know.
“Assault on secrecy,” when you think about it for a moment, sounds suspiciously similar to things like “war on drugs” and “war on terror.”
Anyway, initial reports from the government indicate the opposite of a break in the official barricades.
A more pressing desire to get after the leakers, tighter controls on information, new restrictions on portable data storage — none of which can protect from Bradley Mannings.
Maybe it will sort out in some favorable manner. I doubt it, though. There will just be more releases of information, more frenzied measures to bring a halt to it, bigger punishments demanded and ever louder cries for violent solutions.
DD has written that al Qaeda has grokked to the fact it doesn’t have to be successful in its bomb plots. Simply having a failed one is enough to instill a paroxysm of security measures which inevitably have little or nothing to offer whatever the next plot — often failed — will try and bring to the table.
In the November issue of al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, the UPS/FEdEx bomb plot is the subject.
There are pictures and some details on the cost and technology involved. The al Qaeda men let on what was already known — that the bombs passed through foreign screening without impediment. In the case of the UPS bomb, the story related tells there was no screening at all.
al Qaeda also takes credit for downing an UPS cargo jet in early September, an event authorities have denied was due to bombing a couple times.
In any case, AQ writes:
In such an environment of security phobia that is sweeping America, it is more feasible to stage smaller attacks that involve less time and less players to launch …
It’s a decent observation but the thread of the argument is spun out to finely.
Thanksgiving went on as advertised. The mass damage to the economy — which al Qaeda envisions as the attack of a thousand cuts, or Operation Hemorrhage — isn’t being done by them.
However, the rules imposed by the previous year’s underwear bomber have become a sensation.
And one awaits the seizure of a dead or alive rectum bomber, preferably someone suitably mentally ill.
Inspire insists 340 grams of PETN were used in the air parcel bombs, rather less that what was commonly reported in the news, if accurate.
Motorcyclists attached bombs to cars carrying two of the country’s top nuclear scientists early Monday, detonating them from afar. One scientist was killed and the other injured.
Iran immediately accused the United States and Israel of again trying to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that “undoubtedly the hand of the Zionist regime and Western governments is involved. ??? He also publicly acknowledged, apparently for the first time, that the country’s nuclear program had been disrupted recently by a malicious computer software that attacked its centrifuges.
Good advertising, though, for contractors wanting to enlarge their portfolios into cyber-warfare.
It’s bad news for everyone who harbors even a slight hope for reason.
More Stuxnets, faster stronger Iranian advancement toward the bomb, more instability, even less incentive for non-violent outcomes.
In this sense, Stuxnet could be seen as counter-productive, since it did not actually shut down the program but was more of a harassment.
In other words, it’s a kind of argument which gives you the sub rosa idea that the extreme right GOP wants Iran and nuclear proliferation to advance quickly because it enhances recommendations for ballistic missile defense spending. So it’s in their interest to see that things gets gummed up.
The president should dump the New START treaty — its one-sidedness makes the U.S. look like a lousy negotiator in the eyes of the world … and a patsy in the eyes of the Russians. — some Heritage employee who writes about every rotten idea the foundation wants pushed
And, of course: “The President should also make it a publicly top priority to hunt down any American connected with these leaks and prosecute them.”
The austerity police like to talk about going after social entitlement programs. And President Obama today made a toady of himself by announcing a pay freeze for federal workers — middle class earners across the board and throughout the country.
However, no one ever speaks about the other big slice of entitlements coming out of the American pie.
That’d be defense contractor spending, which now expands into everything under the rubric of the global war on terror.
One would not expect the arms manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, to be involved in anything connected with bioterrorism.
But it is.
Northrop Grumman, like Lockheed Martin, tries to expand into every corner where there is access to taxpayer money. And it does it all under the sales pitch afforded by the war on terror.
It is good to think of it as corporate welfare for the haves, something that gives virtually nothing back to the middle class.
In this case, it’s the market for bioterror detection. Testing of subsidiary-made sensor networks and devices for detection of bioterrorism has a fine record of failure. The things just don’t work reliably — and there’s no realistic expectation that they should given the complexity of the task.
There is, however, a lot of room for fudging and advertising claims that will never be met.
And the Dept. of Homeland Security is dedicated to pursuing them.
LINTHICUM, Md. | The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has awarded Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) a contract to begin field testing a new generation of autonomous biodetection instruments as part of the BioWatch Gen-3 program.
Northrop Grumman was awarded the $8.4 million task order under the BioWatch Gen-3 System Performance Demonstration Contract. The total potential value of the contract is $37 million over three years.
Northrop Grumman will test 12 of the Next Gen Automated Detection System (NG-ADS) units in outdoor and indoor locations in a major U.S. city for several months to determine the readiness of the systems for future deployment. The company will provide autonomous biodetection equipment and technical support, including the operation and maintenance of the units during the course of the field test.
“The NG-ADS technology has the potential to significantly improve the nation’s ability to quickly detect and respond to a bioterrorism event,” said Dave Tilles, director of Homeland Security and CBRNE defense programs for the Advanced Concepts & Technologies Division at Northrop Grumman’s Electronic Systems sector. “This effort builds on the company’s work to support our customers as they enhance the country’s defenses against potentially catastrophic threats such as bioterrorism.”
Eight and a half million dollars doesn’t sound like much here. But once you start adding up all the outlays for projects like this, spread around the corporate national security infrastructure, you start seeing big money. And almost none of it is innovative. And almost a decade in on the war on terror, not particularly good for the well-being of a country that desires a strong middle class.
It’s money that could be more easily and productively spent on things like teacher salaries doled out to the states, educational opportunities, or public health initiatives.
It is a form of parasitic entitlement spending for a part of corporate America that doesn’t give much back.
Glad to see the FBI continue its trend of entrapping brown-skinned US citizens with crimes of attempted terrorism. They’re almost as good as the police detectives in “Minority Report” when it comes to arresting people for crimes they were thinking of committing.
He also opines:
Mohamud became “radicalized” when he was 15 – in 2006, just when things were getting nice and hot in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not really a shock. I get it, he was a bad guy, but he was also exceptionally stupid. I really have to disagree with the WaPo journalist’s suggestion that there are “extremist cells” and “a wave of homegrown terrorism” in the United States.
Over the same period of time, there have been two arrests in California, of older men with their own home ‘bomb factories.’ But they’re white guys and fucked up in a different way, flavors the newsmedia and reporters interested in radicalism and alleged Islamic homegrown terrorism are not so interested in.
Explosives experts have pulled out of a northern San Diego County home with a large quantity of bomb-making materials because it’s too dangerous.
The Sheriff’s Department says “proactive operations on site have been suspended” and local, state and federal explosives experts are making plans to re-enter the home and remove hazardous materials.
No further action is expected until Dec. 1, at the earliest. Investigators say there is no immediate danger to the community.
Among other things, bomb technicians found what is believed to Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, which was used in the 2001 airliner shoe-bombing attempt as well as in last month’s airplane cargo bombs.
Fifty-four-year-old George Djura Jakubec is in jail after pleading not guilty on Monday to running a bomb factory at his home.
Jakubec is a naturalized American citizen from Serbia, said to be an unemployed computer programmer who was also into bank robbery. He was apparently found out when a gardener set off an explosive at the residence in question.
A San Diego County man accused of robbing banks and having the largest cache of homemade explosive compounds ever found in one spot on U.S. soil was ordered by a judge Monday to remain in custody on $5 million bail.
Deputy District Attorney Terri Perez told Judge Marshall Hockett that after a gardener was injured in an explosion at Jakubec’s unincorporated Escondido home last week, a large amount of hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, or HMTD, was discovered.
Investigators with the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and San Diego County Sheriff’s Department also came across other explosive compounds known by the acronyms of ETN and PETN, the prosecutor said.
PETN was the highly volative explosive used by the shoe bomber in 2001, the underwear bomber and in last month’s cargo plane plot where computer printers loaded with the explosive were placed on planes bound for the United States.
Escondido Police Lt. Craig Carter says officers responding to neighbor reports that 45-year-old Richard Hinkel was screaming obscenities in his backyard Sunday morning found 18 explosive devices, fireworks, 12 rifles and 10 handguns on the property and arrested Hinkel.
A bomb and arson unit from the sheriff’s department confiscated the devices and guns.
Carter says it appears Hinkel was turning fireworks into more powerful explosives.
The home is in the same area as that of George Djura Jakubec, who last week was charged with running what authorities called a bomb factory in his home.
Carter says the explosives found Sunday were far less potent and investigators do not believe the two cases are connected.
And it’s purely malicious to note that both “bomb factories” where in one of the few southern California places to vote GOP in November.
It should not come as a surprise that the mainstream media, after enjoying publicizing all the bad stories about the TSA and airport security misadventures now feels compelled to run stories and polls explaining how the TSA is just doing its job, its workers are in a bad position, and many Americans think being treated like crap is cool. As long as they’ve been told it’s for the good of the country and everyone else, too.
The latter view is unsurprising although one guest on Olbermann just a few minutes ago expressed some astonishment at the news.
Many travelers said that the scans and the pat-down were not much of an inconvenience, and that the stepped-up measures made them feel safer and were, in any case, unavoidable.
“Whatever keeps the country safe, I just don’t have a problem with,” Leah Martin, 50, of Houston, said as she waited Monday to go through security at the Atlanta airport.
At New York’s LaGuardia Airport early Tuesday, Jeannine St. Amand got a pat-down in front of her husband and two children. The 45-year-old from Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, figured she got one because the underwire of her bra tripped the metal detector.
“It’s hard to remember all the restrictions. Next time, I’ll wear a different bra,” she said.
Probably all true. DD doesn’t think it would be hard at all to find people who, after years of being seared by stories about the big bad al Qaeda men, the shoe bomber and the underwear bombers, believe whatever you tell them when it comes to national security necessity.
What of the annoying fact that the last two famous failed incidents — the underwear bomber’s smoking parts and the UPS/Fed-Ex transported printer bombs, did not involve going through TSA or the multiple buzzing and prodding layers of US security at all?
It’s just of no relevance in such on-the-spot interviews and polls. But I bet a polling or news agency could make it so just by making the questions less leading and more complex in their recitation of recent history as reference point.
One moment from cable television yesterday is of note.
MSNB’s Chris Matthews took time out to bully a woman from EPIC, Ginger McCall, on the matter of airport security, a topic in which he’s simply a daddy-knows-best kind of guy. Daddy — in this case — being the national security infrastructure.
What set Matthews off was the lady’s mentioning of former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff’s lobbying efforts for Rapiscan.
Matthews accused his guest of slandering Chertoff, of accusing the latter of corruption, a development he darkly intimated would have consequences.
It was a despicable moment and, naturally, ended the interview.
It was also excessive in its bullshit and odious in Matthews’ toad-like defense of Chertoff. Who can’t be defended in this matter.
The Washington Post covered Chertoff’s connection to Rapiscan early last year. And even after adding a “clarification” to the story, mostly aimed at its original title, it cannot be argued that Chertoff has not become part of the conflict-of-interest revolving door that exists in Washington, one in which people in positions of oversight immediately go to work for the businesses they were formerly supposed to be overseeing.
I’ve written about this for awhile in various places. The bioterror defense industry, for example, is also riddled by this manner of crony-ism.
Anyway, the US model of counter-terror, as most people experience it, is stubbornly reactive. And that has to do with a number of reasons, one of which is tightly bound up with money and opportunity.
Intelligence on terrorism is hard.
However, reactive measures — which includes open solicitation for devices and procedures from the national security industry, is not.
There’s a widespread belief, impossible to dislodge, that devices — or the next one down the road — will be silver bullets. Or at least, always better — when they really just turn out to be … more.
And this is coupled with a supporting cast, people in businesses who sit around imagining what terrorists could do if they had all US resources, and using their concocted tests and scenarios as pitches and sales tools.
So corporate natsec businesses really like the way things work now.
And the people who work in government in homeland security, counter-terrorism, policy and oversight in these areas, are regularly recruited and poached away by lucrative offers in the industry. Or the implication and recognition that such positions await them once they leave government service.
This is the same revolving door which you see everywhere else in American government overtaken by corporate capture.
“A Colorado man thinks he’s found a way to protect your private parts from unwanted radiation and government peeping at airports,” it begins.
“Jeff Buske of Larkspur is selling tungsten-lined underwear on-line …”
Where on-line?
Ah, you have to wait for it.
Infowars.com, the creation of fringe radio personality Alex Jones. The newspaper declines to helpfully inform readers that people who visit infowars.com are nuts.
Besides the ads pushing golbuggism, colloidal silver snake oil, and fluoridation contaminating your precious bodily fluids, today’s big stories on the website include an expose on how the RAND Corporation is behind the outbreak of hostilities between the Koreas and how the “US military industrial complex armed North Korea with nuclear weapons.”
In other words, the people allegedly “buying” tungsten-lined underwear are the same people DD occasionally mentions as part of the longstanding US extremist fringe.
Now, we’re not just talking Tea Partiers here.
It’s the real cream of the damaged crop, those who exchange e-mail newsletters on how the US has set up death camps, that electromagnetic pulse doom is about to rain from the sky, and that the collapse of US civilization is imminent. So one needs to harden and prepare the bunker in the pasture for the time when the hordes — the rest of us — coming storming out of the cities, desperate to take their stuff.
Somehow you don’t get that from the Los Angeles Times, despite the mildly tee-hee quality associated with talk about shielded bras and “nipples.”
One is tempted to call it a new low for the newspaper. But it’s not.
Predictably, the TSA has run into an ostomy patient, someone who had his bladder removed because of cancer. And the results were as bad you might expect.
A humiliated urine-soaked older man — someone with who couldn’t possibly be a terrorist — and another story of professional training in callousness as a way of doing things and TSA workers unable to develop or use good judgment.
From the AP:
TSA agents need to be trained to listen when someone tells them they have a health issue, because the one thing that Tom in his account talked about was he tried to explain and they just weren’t even interested in listening,” Saxton told The Associated Press.
“No one living with an ‘ostomy’ should be afraid of flying because they’re afraid of being humiliated,” she said.
“Tom Sawyer, a 61-year-old retired special education teacher, said the experience left him in tears before he caught a flight to Orlando, Fla., on Nov. 7,” it reads.
From the Register, by DD, after the underwear bomber’s apprehension last year:
In the paranoid atmosphere of oversurveillance, it doesn’t take much work to imagine a classified memo at the Dept of Homeland Security or the TSA warning to be on the lookout for the bizarre-looking terrorists masquerading as ostomate patients, even though such people are generally not young men.
“A urostomy or colostomy bag and its tubing could give cover for small amounts of PETN and chemical fusing,” it might go. “Such things have the additional value of being designed to prevent unseemly leaks and odors although not designed for compounds more active than those produced by the human body.”
No joke.
A subsequent story notes:
A bladder cancer survivor, Thomas Sawyer now wears a wears a urostomy bag, which collects his urine through an opening in his stomach. When the bag was fondled by a TSA agent after the bag set off alarms in the airport’s scanner, urine spilled all over Sawyer’s clothes.
This is factually inaccurate, or very poorly worded.
DD’s dad died in his mid-50’s from metastatic bladder cancer. His bladder was removed, and the ureters redirected to an opening made in the abdominal wall — not the stomach. However, it’s easy to grasp the fact that the seal which allows drainage to a bag is very obviously a fragile one.
People who won’t listen when someone tells them of such a thing during a security check reveal training and procedures to be inadequate to dealing with the public, except in a hostile manner.
From the Associated Press today, news that an American security firm — unnamed — had used the Namibian police to try and put a test bomb — non-explosive, on a plane for Germany.
A suspicious package found in a Namibian airport near bags bound for Munich was a device designed to test security and didn’t contain explosives, officials said Friday. One aviation official said the test was conducted by Namibian police.
Wednesday’s discovery of the package at Windhoek airport came the same day that Germany raised its terrorist alert level.
German security experts determined that the bag was a “real test case” made by an American firm to test security measures, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters Friday.
“Most important is that there were no explosives in the bag and there was never any danger to the passengers,” de Maiziere said.
Namibian police confirmed his report but did not say who may have been testing security at Windhoek. An Air Namibia official, however, said it was Namibian police themselves who had conducted the test. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because it was a police matter.
Concern that international flights were once again being targeted by terrorists rose last month when two mail bombs were discovered being sent on cargo planes from Yemen to the U.S. One of them went through a German airport before being found in Britain.
Since the American corporate model with regards to national security is only concerned with making devices and using resources to constantly set up tests after al Qaeda tries something — which often fails — this is depressingly familiar. That it caused German security to jump is probably a cause for jubilation at someone’s business.
The wretched paradox is that there is now way more manpower, money and resources in US private sector business exploring such things than there are actual terrorists trying to do the real thing. al Qaeda could only wish to have such an infrastructure with freedom to operate.
And the reason for this new whoopie cushion news is satirized in my video for “That Logistics.”
Things being the way they are, if I were a mediocre al Qaeda plotter I’d now be trying to find some mentally pliable and unfit recruit to carry a cardboard suppository or cartridge in his rectum. Not because it would actually reliably work but because of the news and reaction it would generate.
The suppository could be filled with something guaranteed to be debilitating by the time the al Qaeda man was on an airplane bound for Europe from some dreadful country where bribes are elementary.
In fact, our mastermind would want him to be found by western counter-terror men. So unreliability and chickening out mid-plot wouldn’t be such liabilities. In fact, if you could do it with two people at two different locations, that would be even better.
You know where I’m going with this. Where the sun don’t shine.
The reaction in the United States would be wonderful to watch unfold.
“See what I can make those people do to themselves,” the man would say to his comrades. Merriment all around.
