05.19.09
Posted in War On Terror at 5:57 pm by George Smith
“[90 Afghan school girls were] rushed to hospital yesterday unconscious and vomiting, possibly victims of a gas poisoning attack on their school in Mahmud Raqi village,” reported a news wire a few days ago.
“[One girl] described the gas smelling like a chemical known locally as Mallatin, which farmers sometimes spread on fields to poison foraging birds. The provincial police chief, Matiullah Safi, said none of the students, teachers or support staff had seen anything suspicious. ‘It looks like something was sprayed in the school but so far no one has been arrested,’ he said. ‘There’s no proof, at the moment, that this was an attack.’
“But the alleged poisoning comes just days after girls at a school in nearby Charikar, on the road north of Kabul, complained of similar symptoms.”
Read more at Armchair Generalist.
“Terrorist groups who are intent on using ‘CBR hazards’ don’t want to go to states with WMD programs and pay for weapons (too complicated and public), and they lack the expertise and patience to develop military warfare agents (not everyone can match Aum Shinrikyo),” writes Jason. “But what they can do is avail themselves of local industrial chemicals and radiological materials that, while not a mass casualty threat, can harm and terrify small groups of people.”
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05.18.09
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Phlogiston, War On Terror at 4:51 pm by George Smith
“The Al Qaeda videotape shows a small white dog tied up inside a glass cage,” writes famous reporter Peter Bergen today for the New Republic.
“A milky gas slowly filters in. An Arab man with an Egyptian accent says: ‘Start counting the time.’ Nervous, the dog starts barking and then moaning. After flailing about for some minutes, it succumbs to the poisonous gas and stops moving.
“This experiment almost certainly occurred at the Derunta training camp near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, conducted by an Egyptian with the nom de jihad of ‘Abu Khabab.’ In the late 1990s, under the direction of Al Qaeda’s number two, Ayman Al Zawahiri, Abu Khabab set up the terrorist group’s WMD research program, which was given the innocuous codename ‘Yogurt.’ Abu Khabab taught hundreds of militants how to deploy poisonous chemicals, such as ricin and cyanide gas. The Egyptian WMD expert also explored the possible uses of radioactive materials, writing in a 2001 memo to his superiors, ‘As you instructed us you will find attached a summary of the discharges from a traditional nuclear reactor, among which are radioactive elements that could be used for military operations.’ In the memo, Abu Khabab asked if it were possible to get more information about the matter ‘from our Pakistani friends who have great experience in this sphere.’ This was likely a reference to the retired Pakistani senior nuclear scientists who were meeting then with Osama bin Laden.”
All of this sensational material, a lead-in for Bergen’s discussion of the US’s Predator drone assassination campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan. For it to have value in this story, one must buy into the idea that in erasing ‘Abu Khabab,’ a Predator drone strike eliminated an al Qaeda capability in chemical and biological weapons. Instead of just offing some odious nobody.
But readers have learned that when it comes to the war on terror, and what the enemy is said to be able to do, much is exaggerated, the product of gossip passed on or published by someone else, or simply made up out of whole cloth by unreliable or anonymous sources working their own agendas.
Indeed, many will remember videotape of a small dog being gassed in a room, recovered during the invasion of Afghanistan. Played hundreds of times during news shows, you would have had to be living without power and water in the hills of North Carolina to have missed it.
However, since then, al Qaeda has shown zero capability in the area of chemical and biological weapons. What has been shown, again and again by DD on the web, is that they have had aspirations and lots of rubbish documents, all amounting to nothing. If ‘Abu Khabab’ had been training “hundreds of militants how to deploy poisonous chemicals, such as ricin and cyanide gas,” he was the world’s worst ‘teacher,’ an unmitigated failure and fool.
For examples of jihadist ‘capabilities’ and ‘documents’ on deploying poisonous chemicals see here and here and here on dirty bombs and here on even more poisons. And for a discussion of al Qaeda’s somewhat less-than-successful stabs at making a cyanide gas bomb, see here. And, since Bergen mentioned ricin, don’t forget all the evidence from the London ricin case, here.
Related:
‘Abu Khabab,’ the alleged chemical weapons expert, has been peddled for awhile now.
In a longer form at the SITREP blog.
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Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 2:47 am by George Smith
“[A $198 million biodefense] lab complex stands completed between an apartment building and a flower market [in Roxbury]” reported the Los Angeles Times on the frontpage today. “But state and federal lawsuits by anxious residents backed by skeptical scientists, have blocked the opening [of the Boston-based lab] until late next year at the earliest,” reported the LA Times on its frontpage today.
“The battle marks the first major setback in the vast growth since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks of labs authorized to research the world’s most dangerous diseases.”
That big daily newspapers are finally getting around to acknowledging that a problem may exist with such an expansion — and that reasonable people are actively opposing it — is a remarkable change from the state of affairs two years ago.
What the Los Angeles Times does not yet understand (and, perhaps by extension, its reporter — Bob Drogin) or is unwilling to say, is that the most logical problem associated with such labs are not those mentioned most prominently in the article: that anthrax or Ebola will escape into the local community or that “hot strains in the labs may attract terrorists…”
The problem is one that has already been demonstrated twice: reliability and the nature of the enemy from within.
There have been only two malicious events associated with biological agents during the war on terror. Both came from within the US. And both were associated with labs working within the bioterror defense infrastructure.
The obvious stand-out is the story of the anthrax mailer, Bruce Ivins, working from the heart of the biodefense industry at Fort Detrick in Maryland where he was the caretaker of the gold standard in anthrax spore cultures and privy to the inner details of the investigation which would eventually drive him to commit suicide.
The other case involved simple greed from the US cosmetic surgery industry. In this little-publicized instance, two scam artists commissioned a research laboratory called List, located in Campbell, CA, to make purified botulinum toxin. That lab was part of the US government’s select agent control regime, one designed to oversee the production of materials thought to be of practical use to terrorists.
Purified botulinum toxin was sold without due diligence and then used by the scam artists to make money through de-wrinkling treatments, undercutting the price of treatments using Botox, the only botulinum toxin drug — made by Allergan — licensed for use on patients in this country.
That story is told here in “Dr. Frankenstein’s cure for aging.”
The scam would have worked if four people had not come down with such severe cases of botulism they required long-term hospitalization. If not for care on life-support, they would have died, making the death toll from misuse of American-made botulinum toxin, one less than the anthraxer’s — who used American-made anthrax. And so it stands to reason that putting more and more people in positions where they are working on, or responsible for, the most dangerous biological agents increases risk to the American public, even if that risk is not precisely measurable. And, if recent history is to serve as an example, such risk is demonstrably real and not to be pooh-poohed.
“Critics of the labs cite the 2001 anthrax attacks as proof that gates and guards cannot stop an insider who aims to do harm,” continues Drogin.
What the Los Angeles Times story does show is there is not a natural enthusiasm among all citizens for yet another bioterror defense laboratory, once they understand all the ramifications of it. They may also instinctively understand that Biodefense Research Corp/University USA is also not much of big-time employer for everybody, like General Motors or Ford in Michigan in their heyday. And so their economic value to any community is not yet proven to be significant.
Related:
A Most Catastrophic Nomination
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05.14.09
Posted in Predator State, War On Terror at 8:15 pm by George Smith
“A former CIA high-value detainee, who provided bogus information that was cited by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war, has died in a Libyan prison, an apparent suicide, according to a Libyan newspaper,” reported the WaPo a day or two ago.
“A researcher for Human Rights Watch, who met Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi at the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli late last month, said a contact in Libya had confirmed the death … Libi was captured fleeing Afghanistan in late 2001, and he vanished into the secret detention system run by the Bush administration. He became the unnamed source, according to Senate investigators, behind Bush administration claims in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to al-Qaeda operatives.”
From DD blog, a couple weeks ago:
“[There were two men] pressured into a handy confessions which connected with the London ricin poison ring.
In Colin Powell’s slide purporting to show terror networks connected to al Qaeda in Iraq, a central spot is reserved for [one] called Detained Al-Qaida Operative. This was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.
“The US Senate’s Select Report on Intelligence in Iraq revealed in 2006 that the CIA informed al-Libi that he would be handed over to a foreign government if he didn’t talk. ‘[Al-Libi] decided he would fabricate any information the interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government.]’
“Nevertheless, according to the Senate report, al-Libi was also put in the hands of the foreign government. He was threatened with torture and then beaten up for fifteen minutes, after which he made up stories about al Qaida connections with Iraq, and nuclear and biological weapons programs.”
Al-Libi was held by the CIA at least as late as 2004. At one point he was apparently returned to Libya. “I wouldn’t bet big money that he was a suicide, as Libya doesn’t treat political detainees very well,” opines Ken Silverstein at Harper’s.
“It’s so fortunate for us Americans that Uncle Dick authorized the use of torture to get all the data he could out of those Islamic terrorists,” writes Jason at Armchair Generalist.
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05.07.09
Posted in Bioterrorism, Predator State, War On Terror at 4:44 pm by George Smith
Updated
Tara O’Toole, CEO of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity,
has been nominated by the Obama administration to be the top scientist at the Department of Homeland Security. While readers may not know the name, if one actually likes their science based in reality, not scenarios which are Biblically apocalyptic and free of facts, it is a dreadful choice.
At the Danger Room blog, Noah Schachtman queried DD and others on the wisdom of the administration’s move. (See here. And in another form, echoed by Spencer Ackerman at the Washington Independent. And from Fox News, here.)
“This is a disastrous nomination,” Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist and homeland security policy critic, told Schachtman.
“O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy
on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush dministration … O’Toole is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney. It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position.???
“She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of overnment, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security … She makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.???
More recently, O’Toole was discussed on this blog as part of a larger piece on predator state security practices. (See here.)
Predator state security ensures that nothing realistic gets done. Rather, it is simply the rapid diversion of taxpayer dollars into the hands of the private sector — in this case — the biosecurity industry. Threats are invented and the most scary predictions are publicized, all to grease the process. And this is what has happened in the United States. The biodefense industry has ballooned in size until it is out of all proportion to the nature of the threat. It has certainly increased the number of American scientists and technologists working with deadly microorganisms. And in these processes, it has escaped from rational, as well as fiscal, oversight. (It should be noted and reflected upon that the most famous bioterrorist, Bruce Ivins, came from the heart of the nation’s biodefense infrastructure.)
In the earlier piece from this blog, O’Toole was noted as “an independent panelist appointed to review the action of the super-biodefense lab called the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center when it opens in 2009.” It was a perfect illustration of a cheerleader for the massive growth of the biodefense industry being put in a position to oversee one of the best examples of massive growth in the biodefense industry.
The choice, in other words, was cooked. And that was because of O’Toole’s work as an advisor to the government, her participation in notorious bioterror wargames and her regular appearance in the media as a harbinger of bio-doom. O’Toole’s public words and actions often seemed designed to serve the creation of the belief in the imminence of catastrophic bioterror, one which led to the creation of an NBACC and many other similar defense research labs.
For example, O’Toole directed an exercise called Atlantic Storm in 2005 which purported to demonstrate effectiveness and consequences of an al Qaeda bio-attack using smallpox. It has been criticized effectively by other experts, most notably Milton Leitenberg, who listed a number of sins attributed to it — sheer exaggeration, juiced disease transmission and amplification of threat, a terrorist facility for making smallpox into a weapon that even state run biological warfare operations did not possess.
“The 2005 Atlantic Storm exercise made ‘grossly misleading assumptions’ about the ease of creating and then dispersing the same biological agent … a dry powder smallpox preparation, a feat that neither the US nor Soviet BW programs ever achieved,” Leitenberg wrote in “Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat.”
“The [Atlantic Storm] scenario we posited is very conservative,” said O’Toole, for the Washington Post in 2005. “The age of biological weapons is not science fiction; it’s here.”
For the Los Angeles Times, O’Toole was attributed: “This could have been much worse. The age of engineered biological weapons is here. It is now.”
Later that year, again for the Post, in a story on how or why the failed national smallpox immunization ought to be revived: “People are now back in dumb-and-happy mode . . . [in contrast with] when we were going into Iraq, and the possibility of a smallpox attack was seen as much more plausible.”
While at John Hopkins University in June 2001, O’Toole also contributed to another al Qaeda-delivered smallpox wargame, one called Dark Winter.
“. . . spookily prescient,” the Post wrote of it, in a story entitled “A War Game to Send Chills Down the Spine.”
However, the Dark Winter exercised used a smallpox transmission rate that was three times its historical average. The alteration juiced the contagion, one that guaranteed the simulation would end in total catastrophe.
“We intentionally picked the absolutely worst-case scenario,” said Randy Larsen, a collaborator of O’Toole’s and one of the game’s architects, to the Post. “We designed a war game they could not win,” he added later in the story.
And ” . . . suddenly, ‘smallpox’ is the threat du jour,” wrote the Post.
Other O’Toole appearances in the press, and there have been many, have always been achingly predictable emphases on the ease of bioterrorism, doom (as in “we’re cooked”) and the inevitability of it all.
From the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001: “These [bio]weapons are cheap, they are easily accessible, and they are going to get worse as the science becomes more sophisticated.”
Attributed in Investor’s Business Daily, in an article about the need for new labs to fight bioterror: “The worst-case scenario is a concerted campaign . . . a little anthrax attack here, a little plague here, and . . . a little smallpox there, then the anthrax again.”
In the Los Angeles Times in 2003: “Bioterrorism is a whole new terrain of national security that’s going to have the same magnitude of impact as the creation of nuclear weapons . . . We should increase spending [on bioterrorism] to $10 billion next year.”
And on avian flu to human flu, in 2005, from various newspapers: “Once you’re there, you’re cooked”; “You’re looking at a nation-busting event”; “[an avian flu plague would be]more difficult and worse than a large terrorist attack, bomb, dirty bomb or airplane slamming into a building” and “If we don’t drive down the costs of drugs, we’re cooked –both in healthcare and biodefense.”
In the world of Tara O’Toole, bioterror has the nation cooked.
Leitenberg added in e-mail to DD, one which had been originally forwarded to Wired but which did not make the cut at press time: “It is a black mark for an administration seeking rational fact based policies. The most absolutely catastrophic appointment conceivable, which promises to ensure continually misdirected resources in the forthcoming years. Whoever was responsible for the selection in the Obama administration should be replaced.”
“Holy Bad Nominations, Batman!” writes Jason at
Armchair Generalist.
“Also of note about [Tara O’Toole] are her ties to the Democratic Party and Congressman John Murtha,” writes Ken Silverstein at
Harpers’ blog.
“Since 2003, she has contributed a total of $8,300 to the Democratic National Committee, as well as a number of Democratic presidential candidates, including John Kerry, Wesley Clark, Hillary Clinton, and most recently Barack Obama. The only member of congress to whom she has contributed is Murtha. In 2004 and 2005, immediately before and after Murtha earmarked money for her center under the Strategic Biodefense Initiative, she gave him $1,750.
“As I’ve noted before, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center – O’Toole’s center is one of its projects – retains as its lobbying firm Ervin Technical Associates, which has close links to the congressman. UPMC’s PAC and employees have donated heavily to Murtha, including $192,500 in 2006. That was the year after Murtha won an $8.5 million earmark for UPMC — lobbied for by Ervin Technical — for a communications network. Ervin Technical is also seeking to win support for a dubious UPMC project which is looking for funding to develop and manufacture biodefense vaccines.”
Protecting the nation from catastrophic bioterrorist health emergencies — the biosecurity industry press release, March 18 2009
David P. Wright, Co-Chair of the Alliance for Biosecurity and Chairman and CEO of PharmAthene, Inc., testified today before the House Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee on the critical importance of developing drugs, vaccines and other medical countermeasures needed to protect Americans from bioterrorism and other catastrophic health emergencies. Effective medical countermeasures for many of the chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) agents that pose the greatest threat to the United States do not currently exist, and Wright argued that the federal government should take a more active role in supporting their development to bolster the nation’s biosecurity.
“Protecting our nation against bioterror threats is no less important than ensuring that we have the tools necessary to fortify and protect our military,” Wright noted, but “funding for the development of CBRN countermeasures, particularly in the area of advanced development, has been woefully inadequate.” Wright stated that “without adequate funding, promising countermeasures will not be developed and the nation will remain vulnerable to a bioterror attack – and make no mistake, a bioterror attack is a real and credible threat.”
“Increased funding would advance the day when our nation has access to these critical countermeasures,” Wright stated, but “until that day arrives, the American people remain at risk.”
The Alliance for Biosecurity was formed in June of 2005 by biopharmaceutical companies and [Tara O’Toole’s] Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Alliance members are committed to partnering with government and promoting a new era in the prevention and treatment of severe infectious diseases – particularly those that present global security challenges – through innovative and accelerated research, development and production of countermeasures. Company members of the Alliance include: Bavarian-Nordic, Cangene Corporation, DOR BioPharma, Inc., Dynport Vaccine Company LLC, a CSC Company, Elusys Therapeutics, Emergent BioSolutions, Hematech, Inc., a subsidiary of Kyowa Kirin, Human Genome Sciences, Inc., NanoViricides, Inc., Pfizer Inc., PharmAthene, Siga Technologies, and Unither Virology LLC, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics.
Tara O’Toole predicts
U Pitt News, April 15, 2005
One hundred kilograms of anthrax dropped on Washington, D.C., would be as deadly as a one-megaton hydrogen bomb.
This is one of the many reasons why Dr. Tara O’Toole believes the use of biological weapons is “potentially imminent.”
O’Toole discussed bioweapons in her lecture “Disease as a Weapon: A New Challenge for the 21st Century.” The speech, full of cautionary words and threats of unavoidable disaster, fell upon the ears of an Alumni Hall audience Tuesday afternoon.
Bioweapons have been proven to work on a large scale; they can kill hundreds of thousands of people at one time. Generally, it is difficult to determine where a bioweapon was let loose, so an exact radius of destruction is hard to calculate, O’Toole said.
Australia Broadcasting System, September 2005
Participants in Atlantic Storm included former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright and former government ministers from Canada, Poland, France, the Netherlands and Italy.
As the exercise began, they were all meeting in Washington for a Transatlantic summit.
Tara O’Toole: We alleged that as these leaders were flying across the Atlantic for this meeting, there were reports of smallpox cases in Europe coming on to the airwaves, and by morning it was confirmed that there were smallpox cases in Turkey and in Germany, and of course since smallpox has been eradicated from the natural world, these confirmed reports meant that there had been smallpox attacks in Europe.
Tara O’Toole: We posited that we had a number of people walking through these busy airports and train stations and so forth, with a backpack on them, just releasing what would be an invisible, odourless cloud of smallpox into the air.
Tom Morton: Atlantic Storm was widely reported in the American media. There were editorials in The Washington Post, calling for urgent action to combat the bioterrorist threat.
The creators of Atlantic Storm knew which buttons to press. They’d already got the ear of Vice-President Cheney with a previous exercise called ‘Dark Winter’.
But prominent scientists have sharply criticised both Atlantic Storm and ‘Dark Winter’. But scientists say it’s highly unlikely that terrorists could mount a mass attack with biological weapons, as the scenarios depict.
One of those scientists is Jonathan King, Professor of Molecular Biology at MIT. King says that the creators of these scenarios are panic-mongering.
Jonathan King: I would say these scenarios were very deeply kind of irresponsible, almost dangerous. They present proposals out of the imagination as if they’re actually established, that some actual named al Qa’eda representatives were in the Soviet Union getting smallpox stocks. Every piece of which is a total figment of the imagination. The notion that the terrorists could grow up smallpox in hidden facilities, tissue culture facilities which have extensive maintenance requirements, this is not again a small-scale thing, it requires a lot of skill, a lot of money, a lot of people, material being delivered in all the time, sterile conditions, positive air control, this is not a low tech garage operation. These scenarios were loaded with proposals that represented a kind of misrepresentation of what’s known about these things, I would say in an extremely irresponsible way.
The Washington Post, July 2006
“We haven’t yet absorbed the magnitude of [the bioterror] threat to national security,” said O’Toole, who worries that the national commitment to biodefense is waning over time and the rise of natural threats such as pandemic flu. “It is true that pandemic flu is important, and we’re not doing nearly enough, but I don’t think pandemic flu could take down the United States of America. A campaign of moderate biological attacks could.”
Defense News, November 6, 2006
The risk and ease of a bioterror attack on either side of the Atlantic equals — or exceeds — that of low-radiation nuclear bombs and thus demands far more rapid-reaction planning compared to prevention, [said a number of bioterror experts.]
The U.S. experts addressed an Oct. 27 biosecurity workshop of European Union and NATO homeland security officials as part of their briefing tour of European capitals. Their organizations were directly involved in Atlantic Storm, the February 2005 high-level bioterror exercise involving U.S. and European politicians.
“There are a least 1 million people [across the globe] who have the academic and technical qualifications to build an antibiotic-resistant bug,” said Tara O’Toole, director of the University of Pittsburg’s Center for Biosecurity. “Ask any biologist whether they could make a bioweapon. I’ve not gotten a ‘no’ to that answer yet.
“Deadly toxins are a very appealing asymmetric weapon, and we see no obstacles to a terrorist getting his hands on them and dispersing them,” she said. “Our political leaders do not understand the urgency and lethality of this threat. And the only defense against bio-attack is post-event preparation, because all you can really do is mitigate the consequences and try to stabilize the situation.”
April 2007, in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Homeland Security
Tara O’Toole:
[Most experts] have deemed a bioterrorist attack and a nuclear attack as the two types of terrorist assaults most likely to destabilize the nation.
Only bioweapons and nuclear weapons are in the top category of lethality.
And 100 kilograms of weaponized anthrax dropped on D.C. under good weather conditions, is likely to cause about the same number of casualties as a one megaton bomb dropped on the city. No other kind of weapon is in this category of lethality.
Furthermore, we know Al Qaida is pursuing biological weapons. We know that from evidence gathered in Afghanistan and documented in the Rob Silverman WMD report.
And we also know, and have explicit evidence that it’s very difficult to attribute a bio-attack to any particular perpetrator, as we’ve seen in 2001.
That means that our traditional means of deterrence against attacks in the United States, i.e., attribution with certain retribution, are weakened.
Really, the only strategy we have for biodefense is to be able to swiftly and very significantly mitigate the consequences of such attack.
In Comgressional testimony, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, October 2007
Tara O’Toole: I think it was the ease of carrying out a biological attack, because these organisms live naturally in the world and are available in hundreds of gene banks across the world. And also because these are replicating organisms. So if you can mount one attack, you can make enough anthrax — for example, if you’re patient — to do two, ten.
So everyone is going to feel vulnerable after the first attack. The whole country’s going to want anthrax vaccine. That’s why sitting here today with enough anthrax vaccine to cover only about 3 million people is so worrisome. And I suspect part of the reason behind HHS’s reluctance to get rid of expired vaccine might not be perfect, it might not what you’d use on a good day. But it might be a lot better than nothing in the breach.
So we need to take, I believe, a much more strategic look both at these two programs that we’re discussing today. And they’re both vital programs as well as at our overall biosecurity strategy.
And I think there’s a lot of complacency and misinformation abroad in the leadership of the country about the biothreat and biodefense. I think people think the threat is much more remote and much less potentially destabilizing than in the case. And I think they believe we’re more prepared than is the case, because we’ve done a lot. We’ve worked hard and spent about $40 billion since 2001 on civilian biodefense.
But the problem is that drugs and vaccines are a lot harder and trickier to make and a lot more expensive than sensors or engineering products. And I don’t think that when we embarked on the BioShield program in 2004, the complexity of this endeavor was fully realized, either by the Congress or by HHS.
The fact is that the $5.6 billion in BioShield is a fraction of what we’re going to need. And part of the delay on HHS’s part is trying to figure out how do we get countermeasures for all the possible threats within that sum of money. So we’re not asking what do we need to defense the country against bioattacks? We’re in effect asking what can we get from this amount of money? We’re basically shopping at Costco. All right?
This is part of the reason why big pharma doesn’t want to get into the game. It’s also why we are dependent upon small, daring biotech companies [see, for example, the Alliance for Biosecurity — ed.] who’ve never made anything before. And making a new drug or a vaccine is a lot more art than science.
That’s just where we are. We’re in a revolution in bioscience. There’s lots of very tempting possibilities coming down the pike in terms of new drugs and new vaccines. But at the current pace, it’s going to take us about ten years to get there. So the whole problem of trying to get what we need for a fairly paltry sum of money, when you compare it to other national security expenditures, is one of the big problems with countermeasures.
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05.03.09
Posted in Phlogiston, Predator State, War On Terror at 9:16 pm by George Smith
Today’s post points toward a column, written by the well-known Barbara Ehrenreich, on another uniquely American sham: That job-hunting is your new job. So get to it. (Incidentally, Ehrenreich — aside from being the most well-known author and critic on the nature of the workplace in modern America, is the public face of United Professionals, an “advocacy group to protect and preserve the American middle class.”)
It’s here — entitled “Trying to Find a Job is Not a Job.”
It encapsulates the concept — mentioned briefly here about a year ago — that Americans have been manipulated into accepting as true all sorts of rubbish about employment and their lack of it. Like: It’s your fault if you don’t have a job; your lack of skills made you obsolete; you aren’t looking hard enough for a job, you must make yourself over into a job-hunting machine; you have to go back to school many times in your life to keep yourself hep and fresh in the marketplace, and most off all, repeat it again and again — IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT WORKING HARD ENOUGH, YOU WEAK SOD!
In a way, it boils down to a novel solution to the problem mass unemployment poses for national security. If the populace is being thrown out of work en masse, and it’s perceived to be the fault of leaders (rather than the people themselves), chances are they might think of going into the street in social protest. Such protests could become more virulent. They could bring down the government, or at least change it during the burning of things. Or also bring about some public facsimile of tarring and feathering for the geniuses at Goldman Sachs, AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, etc.
Instead, because most people buy into the sham, what we get is everyone just sitting at home. Perhaps all Twittering or Facebooking away in hope that a social network of strangers will dispense mercy upon them.
Journalists from business and employment sections have actually said it was good to do this. Really. See here at “Getting Fired is Now Fun.”
Or everyone can upload endless variations of their resumes to Monster or Careerbuilder because it’s been said that this must be done, along with 450 million others and one must have, oh — say, five or six, ten or maybe more different resumes to cover every contingency. And don’t forget to re-write that thing from scratch the next time you upload.
“In America, being unemployed doesn’t mean you have nothing to do but run around burning police cars,” Ehrenreich writes. “Unemployment has been reconfigured as a new form of work.”
Part of your new job is guessing what your future job ought to be. Or failing that, listening to other people, shamming as experts and asking for money, telling you what it ought to be. Then you can run off to a continuing education course or Pasadena City College, or enroll in an on-line diploma mill, and after a year get a chit or certificate in something which you were told will get you a job. And then it won’t. But that’s because you guessed wrong or were lazy or something. Do not pass “Go,” do not collect $200. Go directly to jail.
From January of 2008 of last year, when things were beginning to look dicey, DD requotes from here on “Preparing for Your Dream Job.” That’s from the old blog, the one that can’t be updated because Google Blogger fell over and crushed me.
Want to know the secret of landing your dream job? Making yourself over as a hardened job-hunting machine.
Victoria Secret has figured this out. She’s still in college at UCLA, but an up-and-coming striver, hustling to land a position in the entertainment industry. She has interned with Sony, worked pro bono one year for Walt Disney Outreach and spends nights thinking up slogans and jingles for the Bruin Ad Team, UCLA’s student run advertising team.
Secret is a skilled networker. She e-mails everyone she knows or has ever known who is still in the labor force, letting them know her talents and job interests. And she hands out business cards during her part-time job as a campus sales rep for a PC company.
Secret reviews her resume every month. You should too. “It’s a constant work in progress, like your life.”
Getting hired is all about doggedness, focus and learning to leverage contacts. No one gets anything worthwhile in the 2008 United States of America without being able to call in favors. If you haven’t got faint acquaintances who can assist in getting your foot in the door somewhere, this country is a grim place. If you’re not a persuasive bootlick, your prospects are nil.
You’ve got to throw yourself out there, reaching for any hands or legs there are to be grasped. If you can’t do that, you’ll face rejection again and again.
Here are several things you should do:
Post your resume on-line
You should buy high-quality paper and fresh ink for your printer. In these desperate days, some employers want to have the feel of a good piece of bond in their hands even as they’re tossing it into the trash in favor of the name of someone passed to them by a co-worker or superior. In the meantime, accept that there are virtues to going digital — those being that it’s easy, fast and puts you in a nice position of being immediately accessible, along with the 250 million other people who posted their resumes on-line.
Monster.com, for example, lists hundreds of thousands of jobs in virtually every category and works with 90 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies. To sift them, you’d have to be a machine. And while you are not as capable as such a machine, you must strive to be as machine-like as possible in your on-line search for a job. If you cannot be a ruthless job-hunting machine, you will fail and entropy — the dissolving of everything into nothing — will invade your life.
Other on-line sites target specific fields like jobsforandinmoneymoneymoney.com focusing on accounting and financialization services, annoyingcomputerjobs.com on the obvious, and opportunityknocksbutnotforyou.org, for employment at subsistence wages in the world of nonprofits.
Since there are so many resumes on-line you have about as good a chance at landing something decent as winning a raffle. Have you ever won anything worthwhile in a raffle? That gift certificate to Macy’s doesn’t count.
Apply directly to a company, on-line and off
Many companies post opening on their websites, but responding blind could land your application in a black hole, says Rory Kaplatt, founder of Rory Kaplatt & Associates, a Pasadena search firm. Do it the old-fashioned way: “Get the name of someone and write to that person.”
Everyone knows corporate office-workers and administrators look forward to getting unsolicited mail from desperate people they don’t know. You can check the company’s dumpster for your cover letter and resume a couple of days after you mailed it, if you’re job searching locally. This will allow you to informally keep tabs on the progress of your search. The technique is called “dumpster diving.”
Tap the hidden job-market — plead with your friends
Tell relatives, friends, friends of friends, trusted colleagues — everyone you meet during the day’s travels. Consider hiring a spambot to broadcast your need for a job. Maybe you can even get a job as a spam bot. Now more than ever, blog software employs special visual authentication traps. And so there’s a great need for jobs in which people work in a windowless room, for almost nothing, logging onto blogs, about five or six a minute, to manually upload spam and sales pitches into the comments section.
Anyway, you’re on a job hunt and only by being a ruthless machine will you succeed. For all the sweep of the Internet, only a machine-like focus will do. You must scour the Internet and shakedown your friends, even at the risk of alienating them. If you don’t know about a position, you can’t apply for it. And if you can’t find that job, your friends and everyone else will not want to know you, anyway. When you reach that critical point, which will be soon, your job search will collapse into a black hole. And after six months in the black hole of failed job search, you will be hardcore unemployable.
So you see why you must always be a ruthless job-searching machine. Do not flinch or shirk in this duty.
Being a ruthless job-searching machine worked for Diana. She started with a computer search to build a list of companies where she might want to work and wrote directly to people at each specifying the type of job she hoped to find. You can imagine how that went. The employers didn’t have any openings, but her job-hunting machine routine made such an impression that one eventually found a place for her. The 20-something Los Angeles woman doesn’t want to use her full name because that job wasn’t really a great job. In fact, she’s out of that job and hunting for a new one and if someone sees her name on-line in one of the firms she’s targetting, it won’t be good for the image.
Polish your resume — burnish your credentials, everyone else does
Putting your best self into pixels is a craft “that has to be mastered,” says Richard Bolles, author of the job-hunter’s bible, “Your Arbeit Will Set Your Free.” Job-hunting first-timers and veterans can find plenty of resume tips in the book, as well as on major job search sites. You should be spending at least two hours each day reading up, but in case you can’t get there today, here are some rules of thumb:
1. Be specific. Instead of saying “worked in a retail setting at the strip mall,” try “trained and supervised ten employees, one of whom went on to be a doctor, and handled payroll and purchasing in a firm with annual sales of $20 million.” No one can check or know how much places in strip malls pass in cash or if your co-workers were actually high school drop-outs and community college students.
2. One size does not fit all. Employers expect your resume to clearly show why you fit their specific opening, even if they don’t know what they want in an employee. This presents you with a dilemma. To be successful, you must be a ruthless resume-reworking machine, re-editing your vitals for finicky people whose nature you can only make wild guesses about. As crushing as it sounds, for every job application that you make, you must make a custom rewrite of your resume.
3. Typos or grammatical errors will route your resume into the trash. On the other hand, consider a rigorously spell-checked and elegantly composed resume in the hands of a prospective employer. Think of the e-mails you’ve received from your older college-educated acquaintances now in the corporate workplace. Recall the communications you occasionally get from said-to-be-important people in corporate America at your blog. Now do you really think having a resume that’s grammatical and well written is going to help that much? Come now, it could just as well have the opposite effect, pissing off a reader who gets it into their head you’re probably one of those who thinks they’re smarter than everyone else. So go ahead, make some mistakes. It’s all headed for the trash anyway.
Prepare for the interview — and brush your teeth
Spend time on the company’s website, even if it’s unusable. Check out their annual report and commit to memory the pack of lies that passes for their page of recent press releases. Be prepared to explain why you want the job and when asked what your biggest fault is as a worker, be able to convincingly explain how youve made it into your strongest asset, even though it’s not true. Try to convey the impression that you would give up any prospects for a social life outside work hours and that you might possibly even break the law, if that’s what is necessary to get that job done.
Be sure you come to the interview in a good-looking car or SUV. Make sure it’s clean and shiny. Everyone in America judges the worth of others, whether they admit it or not, by the size and condition of their vehicles. Employers are no different. If you have to, lease a car you can’t hope to afford. You can always declare bankruptcy and get hopelessly in arears later.
Shake hands with any prospective employer. Extend your arm, grasp the hand of the person you are greeting firmly but not crushingly. Don’t go limp. And don’t, don’t, don’t have a sweaty palm. Dry your hand thoroughly with some tissue paper before the interview.
Final resort: Study to become a public example
This involves emulating what some people do in the cities of Europe and Pakistan, environs where there are lots of young men, children of immigrants, who have no realistic hope of bettering their life.
Start hanging around on websites which cater to the distribution of texts advocating violent overthrow. Download all the texts on making poisons you can find on the Internet. Add some more on improvised home-made explosives.
Contact your local white Christian Minutemen or al Qaeda self-improvement and re-employment group.
Related: Bed Pan Training Schools Rejoice.
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04.23.09
Posted in War On Terror at 10:23 pm by George Smith
The daily news on methods of US torture and the Bush administration’s legal justifications for its routine use as an instrument of national power can, at times, make it seem that our watchdogs were always on the ball.
Then reality snaps back in place.
So today DD will take readers back to when his eyes were opened to the bad faith and deceptions being thrown our way because it was convenient to the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war on terror.
It was some time around mid-2004 when British researcher Duncan Campbell came to me for some advice with regards to what would become known as the London ricin trial.
In early January of 2003, British anti-terror forces had arrested seven men and allegedly “equipment needed to produce ricin and recipes for ricin, cyanide and several other poisons” at a Wood Green flat in the north of London, according to the BBC.
The British authorities called this Operation Springbourne and it continued to sweep up people said to be connected to a plot aimed at spreading poisons in London. One of the men grabbed in the raids is named Kamel Bourgass. During his arrest he stabs to death a British constable, a crime on which he will be convicted two years later and sent away for life.
Bourgass and four of these men are set in the dock for the London ricin case which was to be followed with another trial dealing with the rest of the alleged conspirators.
Campbell, who was working for the defense, had a stack of poison recipes, gathered from police raids and various other al Qaeda hideouts in Kabul and Kandahar which were part of the evidence to be used in the ricin trial. He sent electronic copies of them to me in Pasadena and we chatted back and forth over their impact and origins. In return, I sent back original materials of US nature from which these poison recipes were drawn.
I had been writing up analyses of ricin recipes found on the web and publishing them through GlobalSecurity.Org. Campbell had read them. And the ricin and other poison recipes were central to the UK government’s case.
The prosecution wished to prove they were exclusive to al Qaeda, thereby establishing a link between the accused and the terrorist organization. But the recipes weren’t exclusive. They originated in the US far right in the late Eighties and had been copied around the world, then translated to Arabic. Along the way they picked up minor differences in transcription and things added by individuals translating them. So the recipes seized in the UK ricin ring raids, all Kamel Bourgass’s, did not originate in al Qaeda hideouts. They were transcribed from Yahoo servers in Palo Alto.
However, before all this had been figured out, I was of the mind that the men in the dock, Algerians, were all going to be sent over. There was still a belief that the charges were probably based on reasonable assumptions. If Colin Powell, for example, had identified the London ricin ring, which he had called the UK poison cell, in his speech before the UN Security Council in September of 2003, there had to be something to it, right?
This was, Powell’s presentation inferred, part of a web of terrorist intrigue stretching from Iraq and al Qaeda into Europe.
Well, a few months went by before the start of the trial and, gradually, things changed.
The evidence I was given was ridiculously trivial: Stupid Internet-cadged recipes for poisons, a ridiculously small number of castor seeds — 22, along with absurd ideas that one could make a cyanide weapon from a couple handfuls of cherry pits.
And I asked Campbell, in essence, what the heck was going on? This couldn’t be serious. It was pathetic and lame. No one with half a mind could consider anything like this as part of a terrorist chain, connected with Iraq, which threatened the UK and United States.
I asked Campbell where the information came from on this poison team and the alleged Wood Green poison lab.
And then he told me about the UK government informant, Mohamed Meguerba, who’d been the source of it on the basis of a confession he’d made while being held in a prison in Algeria. I was eventually told that Meguerba had been tortured into a confession and later recanted it and, so, the UK government was not going to be able to bring him to court to testify.
At that point the prosecution’s case was badly hindered. A lot of the accusations rested upon getting a jury to believe the statements of the informant. And then it was necessary to completely switch strategies.
It was at that point I became disillusioned. It had been shown that you couldn’t believe anything the US government said. That Kamel Bourgass and his recipes for making poison from rotten meat or a handful of castor seeds to have taken the stage as a shadowy player in the hard sell the Bush administration used to drum up enthusiasm for war in Iraq was intellectually bankrupt.
Yesterday, Paul Krugman’s blog at the New York Times republished quote from Jonathan Landay of the McClatchy News service.
“The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist,” it read.
“Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.
“The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.”
With regards to the London ricin case, Meguerba’s recanted confession about a ricin plot was apparently not part of a US operation. It was, however, still conveniently used by the Bush administration.
And there was a second man who’d been pressured into a handy confession, one which also connected with the alleged ricin poison ring.
In Colin Powell’s slide purporting to show terror networks connected to al Qaeda in Iraq, a central spot is reserved for a man called Detained Al-Qaida Operative.
This was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.
The US Senate’s Select Report on Intelligence in Iraq revealed in 2006 that the CIA informed al-Libi that he would be handed over to a foreign government if he didn’t talk. “[Al-Libi] decided he would fabricate any information the interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government.]”
Nevertheless, according to the Senate report al-Libi was also put in the hands of the foreign government. He was threatened with torture and then beaten up for fifteen minutes, after which he made up stories about al Qaida connections with Iraq, and nuclear and biological weapons programs.
Nevertheless, in January and February of 2003, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz cited it as one of a number of reasons for escalation to war in Iraq.
“The gravity of the threat we face was underscored in recent days when British police arrested seven suspected terrorists in London and discovered a small quantity of ricin, one of the world’s deadliest poisons, for which no cure exists,” Cheney told the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC. (In reality, no ricin had been discovered, just castor seeds. This information would be suppressed for another three years.)
“Make no mistake, America is at war,” Cheney continued. “And the front lines are our centers of work, of transportation, of commerce, and entertainment … We will also continue our efforts to stop the grave danger presented by Al Qaeda or other terrorists joining with outlaw regimes that have developed weapons of mass destruction to attack their common enemies — the United States and our allies. That is why confronting the threat posed by Iraq is not a distraction from the war on terror. It is absolutely crucial to winning the war on terror.”
And on February 6, Paul Wolfowitz added: “[We] see, for example, close connections between Iraqi intelligence, and even the Iraqi leadership, and this network that is actively working to do attacks with ricin and other deadly toxins. Some of them have been arrested in London. Some have been arrested in Spain and elsewhere in Europe. We’re working on finding as many of them as we can. The problem is, some of them are hiding, probably effectively.”
With regards to the London ricin case as I knew it, these statements were misinformation and fraud.
In September of 2004, the London ricin trial went forward. A gag order was imposed on the English press, one that lasted until the end of the trial in April of 2005.
The UK government’s case had been irrevocably damaged. A jury eventually acquitted everyone but maniacal loner Kamel Bourgass.
Bourgass was locked up for life, also convicted on a charge of conspiring to cause a public nuisance with poisons.
“Does torture work?” is the question one now sees almost everyday. Yes, yes it does, reply various officials and Bush administration main men. It has kept us safe.
My take is that, yes, torture did work. It worked to provided convenient fictions which were in turn used to justify war with Iraq.
The result of the ricin trial — acquittals and the realization among large portions of the English public that the original story had been all wrong, that there was not an extensive terror network of poisoners who had been trained by al Qaeda and were connected to Iraq — was the start of the British public becoming disillusioned with George W. Bush’s war. It led to an assumption that the fix was in.
In April of 2005, the American press more or less declined to cover the story. I had offered it to the New York Times. No one was interested.
The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus covered part of it badly. In the process, he had to interview me and growled that I had put the newspaper in a difficult situation. Oh, DD had put the mighty WaPo in a difficult situation because I had found out the London ricin ring was bogus.
“Discovery that the initial ricin finding was a ‘false positive’ was made ‘well before the outbreak of the war in Iraq,’ on March 19, 2003, [George Smith] said,” wrote Pincus.
Great job, that.
“A much-touted ricin-plot terrorism case in the United Kingdom ended in a muddled verdict today, raising new questions among U.S. officials about the ability of British authorities to secure convictions against major terrorist suspects,” reported famous Newsweek investigative journalists Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball on April 15, 2005.
However, was this news that the Bush administration had been twisting information for its own aims?
No.
“The mixed outcome dismayed U.S. counterterror specialists who were convinced that [Kamel Bourgass] and his four codefendants were in fact acting as part of a broader international terror plot,” continued Isikoff and Hosenball. “It also gives new urgency to the U.S. terror indictment brought against three other British suspects this week on charges relating to their surveillance of financial buildings in New York, Washington and Newark.”
And then Isikoff and Hosenball quoted the war on terror’s well-known professional witness, Even Kohlmann, to cast the impression that a Brit jury had gone rogue and the justice system had failed.
From the Newsweek piece: ” ‘This is very disturbing,’ says Evan Kohlmann, a U.S. government consultant on international terror cases, about the acquittals in the ricin-plot case. ‘These are dangerous people who are followers of Abu Hamza,’ the radical imam of London’s notorious Finsbury Mosque, which was a favored gathering place for Al Qaeda-linked extremists.’ ”
The US press couldn’t bring itself to report all the nasty fine details. Instead, in 2005 it was still time to run with the rubbish story about a fantasy plot from the war on terror, one which turned out to have been the product of a healthy dose of maltreatment.
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04.17.09
Posted in War On Terror at 10:20 pm by George Smith
Today’s Los Angeles Times frontpage story on the Bush administration’s torture documents was curious for one thing. It didn’t use the word torture until almost the very end of the story (and not on the front page).
Near the end, it reads: “The memo outlined an escalating series of interrogation methods sometimes used in concert, and was written months after the Justice Department had issued a December 2006 document that declared “torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.”
Of course, this fine statement is accompanied by a sidebar containing descriptions of American-approved waterboarding, stress positions, cramped confinement, walling (throwing against a wall), and face slapping, among other things.
The Times goes onto describe torture under supervision of physicians: “[The document] also required that a physician be on duty in case a prisoner didn’t recover after being returned to an upright position … ‘the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy …”
The decision, the Times reported, “was met with criticism among conservatives and CIA veterans, who warned that the highly detailed documents would serve as a counter-interrogation training manual for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.”
This claim takes readers, and the American people, for fools. As has been repeatedly shown on this blog — and in other places — al Qaeda has long had materials in their manuals on what kinds of torture to expect. (See yesterday.)
In any case, human history has shown us there’s very little one can do in the way of training to make one invulnerable to torture.
More succinctly, the complaints against revealing torture methods because it aids the enemy are an IQ test. If you accept them, you flunk. Here’s why: If the United States isn’t in the business of torturing its prisoners anymore, as Barack Obama says, then putting the methods of torture in the sunlight aids the enemy not at all.
Link to full story
here. Not pointed at the LA Times because while the hardcopy of the newspaper is a delight, the online edition’s load times are atrocious. In Tribune company’s grasping for every last penny on the Internet, it has made the Times website one of the most unbearable, as a total bandwidth hog, on the Internet. By comparison, the New York Times seems almost as simple and clean as this blog.
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Posted in War On Terror at 6:15 pm by George Smith
“The methods [in the torture memos included] keeping detainees naked for long periods, keeping them in a painful standing position for long periods, and depriving them of solid food,” reported AP today.
“Other tactics included using a plastic neck collar to slam detainees into walls, keeping the detainee’s cell cold for long periods, and beating and kicking the detainee. Sleep-deprivation, prolonged shackling, and threats to a detainee’s family were also used.”
None of this was unexpected. What was a bit startling was a potentially blanket get-out-of-jail free card for those involved in implementing it.
Over the past years, articles on torture and the ramifications of it have been singularly unpopular on DD’s blog. There are only a few in the pundit class and a handful of national newspapers or publications which are approved for the subject. Everywhere else, it’s a recipe for losing eyeballs. Covering war-on-terror trials at The Register, for instance, was unpopular. Relatively speaking, few cared to see unpleasant stories, stuff with no moral or happy ending, about people being sent over on flimsy or virtually non-existent charges.
And so it will be this story again. Compared to a review of the Boxmasters or something about how awful Saturday night movies on the Sci-Fi channel are, it’s a cooked snail. DD invites you to spread the URL. (That’s already failed.) He dares you to brook annoying pals with another post on the boiled lead of torture and its consequences.
But now to the meat of the action.
DD republishes screen shots from the original manual of jihad in Afghanistan, presented to me as part of the parcel of evidence to be considered while doing research as a consultant to the trial of the alleged London ricin ring.
The manual, put together in the late Eighties, included sections on what jihadis could expect if they were taken prisoner by Middle Eastern governments. The United States, as I shall show, was excluded from this ‘assessment.’
A sample:
Other methods included:
And:
It’s not necessary to put a red check mark next to those which now align with methods used by the American government in the last few years. And it’s equally stupid to grant any semblance of logic to semantic arguments about which methods are torture and which aren’t. Those who wrote the manual of Afghan jihad considered them torture. They would, of course, consider American methods cited at the top of the post as torture. And sane people the world over would consider all of them torture, whether applied singly, in combination, or under a doctor’s supervision.
The original jihad manual also included the following bit of information:
All of them — Middle Eastern nations known as human-rights abusers. To which, on the say so of of panicked and fearful American leaders and the tacit acquiescence of a supine press and populace, we added ourselves. And thus forfeited our souls and the worldwide belief that our country was the side of unassailable right.
The original manual of jihad for you to see is here at Cryptome.
“The United States [was not mentioned in the manual’s torture section],” wrote this blog two years ago. “One might reasonably think this was because it was a long way off from being regularly thought of as in the business of torturing captives.”
At that time, the Bush administration was quoting from the manual of Afghan jihad for political purposes, speaking of a section in which al Qaeda discussed the legitimacy of beating and killing prisoners during interrogation. (See here and here.)
This was, George W. Bush said, proof of the evil of the adversary. What this was, more precisely and put in context, was part of a chain of events which defined the very essence of American national hypocrisy and shame.
More recently:
Tortured by ours or yours?
Which part of torture don’t they understand?
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