Omar Mateen’s calling of 911 from the toilet of the Pulse and subsequent declaration of allegiance to ISIS was just a smokescreen. Mateen knew he was going to be killed and tried to set the story. In this he was successful.
In my estimation, Mateen was a loathsome and apparently very vain American man who just happened to be Muslim. He blew a spoke because he was gay or bisexual, couldn’t be a human being about it and so decided to kill a lot of gay people at a club he frequented. Using his paramilitary/police training and weaponry. Self-radicalized, my butt.
Mateen’s obsession with selfies was and is nothing less than nauseating. It’s not the picture of a Muslim terrorist. It’s the picture of someone, very disagreeable, in love with himself. Mateen probably sent them to many people he wished to hook up with (it now appears this is so), unbidden, who woke up to the news of his massacre and said to themselves, “Oh, jeezus, that guy!”
This story will come out. There were people at the club quite familiar with Mateen but now circumspect in what they have to say, understandably so, because they don’t want the FBI, Homeland Security and the media crawling all over them.
Would you?
This is most probably the central truth of the massacre, one that our six figure media explainers and terrorism experts simply won’t want to attribute without wasting everyone’s time concocting some long, stupid and convoluted story about ISIS and its inspiration to those not yet fully realized terrorists.
“Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump reacted to the Orlando shooting with evidence that they can agree on at least one thing: bombing people,” reads The Intercept. “Both candidates called for an escalation of the U.S.-led bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.”
You would expect nothing else.
Right on schedule, sales of AR-15s/M-16s jump. The real national character is defined by the image of the assault rifle, one aimed at your head.
Take a week or two reading mass opinion polls on terrorism while consulting with your multi-millionaire advisors carried over from the husband’s administration:
[Hillary Clinton’s strategy to battle terrorism] will include shutting down the terrorist network’s recruitment efforts online, stopping would-be jihadists from getting training overseas, preventing foreign fighters from coming into the U.S., discovering plots before they can be carried out and supporting law enforcement officers who respond to such attacks, according to a campaign official. She will also call for empowering Muslim-American communities here in the U.S.
“Discovering plots before they can be carried out” — groupspeakthink for more domestic and international surveillance as well as not subtle entrapment operations.
“Shutting down the terrorist network’s recruitment efforts online” — high-button cant for futile whack-a-mole, identical to everyone else’s futile whack-a-mole plans.
“Stopping would-be jihadists from getting training overseas” — reused boilerplate for more spying on Muslims domestically and more signature strikes and bombing of poor people in the Middle East and Africa.
“She will also call for empowering Muslim-American communities” — phony concern and happytalk meaning more surveillance of Muslim-Americans, semi-gentle shaming of them for “not doing more” and signaling to white paranoid America that she’s on the job. When reading or hearing the word empowering remember the true meaning — which is disempowering.
What it boilds down is that, again, Hillary Clinton is merely reactive. She looks at trends and formulates a position that coddles what is believed the mass wants. In this case, ginned up by fear after the San Bernardino shooting, to respond with more scrutiny and pressure on Muslims in America.
Nothing Clinton has suggested is new. It’s just the application of more domestic spying, a signal that she’s prepared to be tough, build the national security state, just like everyone else, and continue the endless wars and strikes that have inspired increasing radicalization, abroad and at home.
I watched “Spymasters: CIA In the Crosshairs” last night, Showtime’s new documentary about the CIA’s conversion into a paramilitary operation, rather than an intelligence and spying one, in the war on terror. Naturally, I stole it. [1]
Near the end, all the CIA’s directors, including Obama’s, insist the US can’t kill its way to victory. And that droning doesn’t work because it makes more enemies, even in countries that aren’t droned. At this point, it’s rather like telling us that eggs come from a chicken.
One woman, a senior counter-terrorism analyst named Gina Bennett, says at the end that terrorism isn’t even a threat to the existence of the US.
But no one explains if that’s what they believe, why do they keep ordering up more now that they’ve destabilized most of the Middle East? Your head would explode if it hadn’t been dynamited several times years ago over Iraq. Which they concede they screwed up big time, too.
There’s one fellow in it who rides a big motorcycle. I’ll omit his name and you’ll see below why I don’t want him Googling me.
He organized all the waterboarding for the CIA and looks like he wants to smash your face with a set of bass knuckles all the time he’s on screen.
He’s is softened somewhat by Leon Pannetta, one of Obama’s CIA directors, who works hard to create the impression that he’s a good Catholic and snuck off to church to work through his rosary a couple times after each drone strike he OK’d.
I also learned our waterboarding was not like Nazi waterboarding because we used a third less water, or something.
And you’ll see a quick shot of what might have been bin Laden’s coffin, with a brass plate labelled “Geronimo,” although according to Seymour Hersh the special forces men threw his remains out over the mountains.
Plus, George Tenet is a big and permanently angry churl, America’s grizzly bear. And you’d be like that, too, one supposes if you’d messed up as often and as big time as he did. Although, actually, it was apparently good for his career. Which is also why it’s good to be at the top of the CIA athough we are told CIA director wives don’t think so. It’s great job security. You can set the world ablaze, cost hundreds or tens of thousands of lives, never get fired (well, except for David Petraeus and that was over a girl), be world famous and do very well.
1. I’ll review just about anything. Just send it or suggest where it can be stolen.
Justice, not escalations or state-sanctioned atrocities rationalized as helping an ally. Piecemeal WWIII isn’t a strategy. It’s a description, worth thinking about as in how to undo. Either that or continue to reap the whirlwind.
When and where: Hulu, free, marked as a documentary on police militarization, dated 2007. Apparently, first distributed in 2000-2001, where it went straight to video. Possibly updated much later.
Summary: A snapshot, anywhere from eight to almost fifteen years old, one useful in illustrating how much worse things are now and that, yes, this country is a police state.
A bunch of things to know:
1. Stan Goff, a staff sergeant expert in urban warfare trained Los Angeles Police and others in civilian suppression tactics, the worst of which is euphemistically called Dynamic Entry. Dynamic Entry was developed for use in killing people in house-to-house fighting, at night, in a war zone. Now it’s the common tactic in no-knock police raids. If there is something in someone’s hand when a raid is conducted, they are to be immediately neutralized. This means being shot. Twice. Goff tells the audience, years ago — remember, that this means a lot of problems when used on civilians. No kidding. There is a segment, now dreadfully familiar, in which an African-American was riddled by gun-fire in such a raid, while he was in the process of calling 911 because he heard the SWAT team outside.
2. MRAPs have gotten a lot bigger and more ubiquitous. In Urban Warrior they’re about half the size you see now.
3. Posse comitatus was essentially dead, the public just didn’t realize it, when Urban Warrior was shot.
4. Non-lethal and less-than-lethal weapons have strict envelopes for usage. For example, many are not to be used on children, the disabled, the mentally ill or the elderly. Chemicals are not to be used in barrages. People are not to be shot in the eyes, head, face or other soft parts. All that has been out the window for ten to fifteen years. Non-lethal weapons are used to start fires, asphyxiate, knock people unconscious through concussion, or blind them.
5. Steve Aftergood, someone we all know, is in it, giving him a listing at IMDb. At the end, a short discussion about 9/11 is tacked on. How the military can be used at home after terrorism is becoming “fluid,” he says. Now, we might say, it is a swirling toilet in which we, but especially African Americans and the poor, can be flushed down the hole by paramilitary action that comes in the dead of night.
6. The Battle in Seattle, or the protests against the World Trade Organization, which had already gone very poorly, was escalated by authorities and police because the President, Bill Clinton, was coming to town and the city center needed clearing.
7. If the people who made Urban Warrior had had the time to add a segment on what the future might hold if Americans continued to choose illusions of security over civil liberties and fairness, videotape from the riots and police responses in Ferguson and Baltimore would have fit perfectly.
8. Then as now, the brunt of police paramilitary operations has been born by the African-American population, the poor and the easily stigmatized.
That alleged slow down on police militarization has certainly gone well.
Fourteen years ago Osama bin Laden showed the world the United States had a glass jaw. After one very hard hit, the world superpower would appear to rise up, united only to see its people and leaders fail in spectacular fashion as they abandoned all principles they thought they stood for.
Fourteen years later, we’re subdued and fearful owners of a combination corporate dictatorship national security state equipped with an armored car-driving paramilitary police force and surveillance apparatus designed for the suppression of civilian participation. Add to that an embedded racial apartheid, one that puts African Americans and the poor in prison for profits, targets of extortion in the way of organized heists disguised as fines for petty infractions and legitimately resentful of their terrible officials.
The largest military and national security complex in world history was erected. And it’s only strategy, with the only exception being the recent agreement with Iran , is attacking much poorer nations with overwhelming force, selectively bombing impoverished regions of misery and lawlessness, launching pinprick military raids/assassinations and creating or exacerbating failed states.
A small example, yesterday, from Fox News and overseas sources (delivered by mercenaries probably on the US payroll, yet), reasonable evidence that ISIS can manufacture small amounts of mustard gas in Syria, for use in mortar shells and improvised bombs aimed at local militias opposed to them.
And who brought it about? We did when an illegitimate war was launched, one that destroyed Iraq and destabilized the entire region, a place where we’re still bombing people, making things worse, stirring the pot, training lousy local fighters who desert, and arming the same with weapons that eventually get turned over to even worse people.
One Kurdish soldier said that of 52 mortars ISIS launched at his team during one attack, three released yellow smoke that caused their skin to immediately water, discharge liquids, blister and create large wounds. Soldiers exposed to the gas vomited and experienced extreme abdominal pain and severe burning and itching eyes. Other mortars discharged a silver glittery substance that stuck to their skin like glue. The Kurdish soldiers said the Iraqi military also said ISIS used these chemical weapons on their forces.
The attached photos, if genuine, show wounds that appear to be caused by a blistering agent.
The nature of the story appears to show that only small amounts, militarily insignificant, are being produced and put into mortar shells, in and of itself a hazardous undertaking. The primary aim would appear to be to cause an additional measure of terror and demoralization.
The incident also appears to describe a failed improvised weapon, I’m guessing — something sticky and flammable — styrofoam or styrene dissolved in an organic solvent until thickened, to adhere. In this case, there was no ignition.
And what are we looking forward to in 2016?
More of the same, almost certainly.
Why, here’s the alleged leading candidate of the Democratic Party, being distasteful and awful, as it turned out, in making what she thinks is an off-camera joke about the killing of Moe Gadaffi.
Hilarious. Failed states and refugee crises.
Still the best song that applies. Shoulda been a contender.
Incidentally, it’s the only rock video to show anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins entertaining in a Maryland bar AND his vanity-pressing white label single, “Pass Me By.”
Ivins’ anthrax mailings touched off the biggest investment in bioterror defense in world history (we’re always number one in these dubious achievements), all to counter a threat, the predicted scope of which has never materialized.
The best and only bioterrorist minted during the war on terror? Our man! Paid for by the US taxpayer.
Also eyeball the video for the “puffer machine.” (We’ll check you now, for purity!) Designed for the detection of explosives at airports, many were bought. None of them worked and it was subsequently canned.
Great quotes, from our old white guys in charge at the Pentagon:
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey, who also testified Wednesday, said he would not support shifting the strategy from sending U.S. military advisers to sending U.S combat troops [to Iraq]. “I would not recommend that we put U.S. forces in harm’s way simply to stiffen the spine of local forces. If their spine is not stiffened by the threat of ISIL on their way of life, nothing we do is going to stiffen their spine.???
The situation is apparently worse in Syria … [The Pentagon] has begun training just under 100 men at a camp inside Jordan. No Syrian forces have yet to graduate from any training program.
In the Middle East, having created failed states in Iraq, Libya and Yemen, our bolt is shot. Pin-prick raids, assassinations by drone, data collection and random tactical bombings mean nothing when the locals have virtually zero interest in fighting for your side or taking training.
Hey, want to be another lopped-off head for ISIS? What? No volunteers?! What’s the matter with you people!
Part of the fog of lies and military aggrandizement that are the regular dispensations on the forever war is that “troves” of information have been seized. It’s insisted that troves are often everything to the war effort.
It’s the concoction of a fable, one in a series of interlocking fables on American military actions in the failed states of the Middle East. Of course, the failed state of Iraq is so because we made it that way. And so an elaborate narrative of total crap must be created in the mainstream media, something to sell the idea that the military action is actually winning in some way, rather than just spreading ruin and death, making an already tortured place worse.
And the troves of information are a necessary part, feeding a fancy that with more and more and more data, war can be massaged, manipulated and managed to your advantage just like the digital world
The most famous of troves, of course, were the materials allegedly seized in the bin Laden raid.
When Seymour Hersh’s story broke that the raid was an arranged killing and that very little material of value was gained during it, the intelligence services moved quickly to offer the bin Laden trove online.
There was little value in it other than as clickbait for net gawkers. To be honest, I saw nothing worthwhile in it. Boring otiose letters, software manuals, American books of no great interest, public domain US documents and papers culled from the web.
One document, and “document” is a little too fancy a word for it, on the “Terror Franchise,” linked to last week, was merely a collection of wishful thoughts, desires and various rubbishes on killing and projects to make poisons and biological weapons. From 2009.
In reading these alleged scrapings, that part of Hersh’s story, that little information had been gained, was off-handedly confirmed.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published another trove story, this time from materials allegedly seized during a Delta Force raid in Syria.
The raid, aimed at bagging one of ISIS/Daesh’s bureaucrats, Abu Sayyaf, killed him. So, in his place, the wife was kidnapped.
New insights yielded by the seized trove — four to seven terabytes of data, according to one official — include how the organization’s shadowy leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, operates and tries to avoid being tracked by coalition forces …
Wives of the top Islamic State leaders, including Mr. Baghdadi’s, play a more important role than previously known, passing information to one another, and then to their spouses, in an effort to avoid electronic intercepts.
“I’ll just say from that raid we’re learning quite a bit that we did not know before,??? a senior State Department official told reporters in a telephone briefing last week. “Every single day the picture becomes clearer of what this organization is, how sophisticated it is, how global it is and how networked it is.???
Abu Sayyaf’s wife, Umm Sayyaf, who was captured in the operation, has also provided information to investigators, one senior American official said.
Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said last month that the killing of Abu Sayyaf dealt a “significant blow??? to the group.
The wives are important claim is central because it lends justification to kidnapping women when everything else has gone to pot.
For the Times, other anonymous officials acknowledged that maybe the intelligence wasn’t really that valuable. ISIS, after all, has not been losing. Quite the contrary.
And the placement of a graphic within the story on the organization’s gains in Libya undercut the entire argument.
Nevertheless, this is what we get from our national security experts.
It’s the equivalent of a designed and purposeful mental illness, in this case, the insistence, in the face of years of evidence to the contrary, that one can find one’s way to some kind of victory against a region spanning foe through pin-prick raids, assassinations of random thugs dressed up as very important and irreplaceable leaders, and the seizure of whatever digital detritus is on hand.
Here’s a perfect example of the pathology at work:
“In the recent raid on Abu Sayyaf, we collected substantial information on Daesh financial operations,??? John R. Allen, the retired general who now serves as the diplomatic envoy coordinating the coalition against the Islamic State, told a conference in Qatar on Wednesday. “And we’re gaining a much clearer understanding of Daesh’s organization and business enterprise.???
This is a stupid-ass belief, something only an American could come up with, that “analyzing the financial operations” of ISIS (it used to be al Qaeda) gets you anything at all. Although it flies with reporters and meaningless conferences at a posh resort in Qatar well away from the battlefield.
“Lt. Gen. John Hesterman III, the top allied air commander, told reporters by phone from his headquarters in Qatar that ‘there is a whole bunch of targeting that is opening up here, as we gain and learn more about this enemy,’ ” it continues.
All this, particularly the NY Times story, it was said, might begin to “sow fear in their ranks that the United States and its allies were beginning to crack their shield of secrecy.”
Keep in mind there is no evidence that ISIS is becoming afraid of anything as it takes more cities in Libya, Syria, and Iraq. And that the thing called the Iraqi Army, trained by Americans, has broken and run twice in combat, requiring complete reconstruction plus ever more infusions of “advisers.”
What you don’t see in the stories as admissions from anonymous sources is the reason American-trained Iraqi formations run. Logically, they probably don’t want to fight or be seen as a US flunky force. But that they will take a training paycheck up until they have to engage in real action.
Why would this be surprising?
Do American military leaders and intelligence men believe analyzing the alleged finances of ISIS, combined with commando raids, are something winning?
If they do, they’re fools. I don’t believe American generals are fools but I do think that since they have nothing to lose by executing the process, they’ll conduct it. It’s a living, apparently.
ISIS gets its money from its conquered areas, in the form of taxes, levies, theft and the sale of anything valuable, whether it be antiquities, small amounts of fuel or other commodities.
And it is now apparent it has learned that American tactical bombing isn’t effective in close-in fighting. This is the same thing the army of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong worked out. The conclusion is that if you close in and fight the enemy belt to belt, the advantage of American air supremacy and bombs are negated.
Here American technology isn’t the last answer, the final thing that trumps all else. Networked communications, information dominance, the super-machines of US war-power have not worked and won’t.
“ ‘We’ve gotten very good at document exploitation,’ said Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury Department official who is director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the [some institute in the nation’s capitol],” reads the Times.
Yes, right. It’s to laugh out loud that someone actually passes it off as wisdom. Document exploitation. Examine the financing. Don’t forget about kidnapping the wife, too.
“Islamic State militants staged attacks near Baghdad and the Libyan city of Surt on Tuesday, underscoring the group’s persistent strength on both fronts despite a months long American-led air campaign against it in Syria and Iraq,” reads another story.
Thought question: Who came up with the theory that point tactical bombing and running what are essentially nothing more than highly trained and supported death squads wins wars or does anything more than make conditions worse in failed states?
If you’re part of the civilian population in such areas, what do Americans think is the current enthusiasm among them for US forces that, whenever they come, assassinate someone, maybe a bad person, while also always destroying a random assortment of the really unlucky in the doing.
The Defense Department said Wednesday that it had mistakenly sent suspected live samples of anthrax to at least 51 laboratories in 17 states and three foreign countries, a higher number than officials had disclosed last week …
Defense Department officials warned that the tally of labs that had received the shipments would probably grow.
The New York Times mentions that the number of labs in America’s so-called bioterrorism defense and research infrastructure has risen to 1,500 from what was already a high number, 400, in 2004. It is an American specialty: an amalgam or public and private sector labs doing what amounts to sometimes dangerous science welfare work, magnificently over-staffed and over-resourced against a national threat, the predicted scope of which never materialized.
It is likely that many will not remember, but those of us who were experts in biological weapons and the alleged use of them by terrorists, warned for years that the expansion would increase the probability of dangerous errors and the potential for another Bruce Ivins.
Again, the number of bioterror attacks since Bruce Ivins (not counting the cracked, troubled and/or misguided people who grind castor seeds) who worked in the heart of the American bioterror research establishment — ZERO.
The mailing of live anthrax spores gives everyone an accidental opportunity to see some of the outlines of the unique public sector/private sector infrastructure bought to fight bioterrorism.
We paid for the network. I suppose it’s nice to see what it’s up to every now and then. In this case, sending out samples for testing against a variety of sensor systems and assays developed in the private and public sectors.
Number of bioterror attacks since Bruce Ivins: 0
A variety of quotes from the script of Dr. Strangelove would seem like a fun thing to do here.
