06.13.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 2:46 pm by George Smith
As if it isn’t big enough already, you can observe how large elements in the media and sources at the Pentagon wish to relight the American war machine, in at least two places.
The bombing theater of Iraq. And doing something about Russia’s slow re-annexation of the Ukraine.
Today, at TIME (no link):
The U.S. confirmed Friday that Russia sent tanks and military equipment to separatist fighters in Ukraine.
The delivery of military equipment threatens to further escalate tensions between Russia, Ukraine and Ukraine’s Western allies …
Someone at the State Department told the magazine, “We are highly concerned.”
At which point two things should occur to you. First: What you mean by we?
And, second, the State Department has been nothing more than a toady (or appendix) of the national security machine since the Vietnam War.
Getting involved in anything on the old battlefields of The Great Patriotic War in the former Soviet Union is an idea magnitudes worse than the epic fraud and disaster that was the invasion of Iraq.
But Americans don’t know this. Most of us probably think Uncle Sam actually beat the Wehrmacht and so, forever, the world owes us a big thank you.
The Soviet Army destroyed the majority of Nazi Germany’s war machine. Without the meat grinder of the Eastern Front, the Second World War might have been very different for Americans on the landing beaches of North Africa, France and Italy.
Russians have very strong feelings about the Patriotic War.
Want to relight a big war? One where you could be badly hurt here? One where drones and bombing the paupers won’t be jolly good and risk-free?
Go, go ahead, trying antagonizing Russians by picking a fight on what they consider to still be their bloody patriotic battlefields.
And what else can you say about Iraq? Nothing, that’s what. We should have the good grace to admit we pulverized the place for no damn good reason and the result is not surprising.
Again, because, some famous last words from 2002:
“You can see them in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all — heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture …???
Heat-packin’ humanitarians, aren’t we all?
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06.12.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 11:52 am by George Smith
From a long time ago.
On the unfolding disaster, extract from the NYT today:
Iraq’s fracturing deepened on Thursday as Kurdish forces poured into the strategic northern oil city of Kirkuk after government troops fled, while emboldened Sunni militants who seized two other important northern cities this week moved closer to Baghdad and issued threats about advancing into the heavily Shiite south and destroying the shrines there, the holiest in Shiism …
Militants aligned with the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria swept across the porous border from Syria on Tuesday to overrun Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. They have been driving toward the capital since then, capturing the town of Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein, seizing parts of the oil refinery city of Baiji and threatening Samarra, a city sacred to Shiites just 70 miles north of Baghdad.
I have nothing to say except we did this.
Now unintentionally hilarious and black quote from Salon writer Wagner James Au, at Salon, in 2002:
“You can see them in the field, in subsequent years, dedicated young men and women, their weapons merged into an information network that enables them to cut out with surgical precision the cancer that threatens us all — heat-packing humanitarians who leave the innocent unscathed, and full of renewed hope. In their wake, democracy, literacy and an Arab world restored to full flower, as it deserves to be, an equal in a burgeoning global culture …”
And in honor, you can again download and listen to Iraq N Roll by Uncle Sam & the JDAMs. Here.
The old recommended donation, not obligatory, was three dollars and fifty cents.
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03.19.14
Posted in Bombing Paupers, Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror, WhiteManistan at 11:13 am by George Smith
Iraqi Freedom commemorative music and art! Read it!
Great stuff. The record, I mean.
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01.30.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 7:51 pm by George Smith
This evening Northrop Grumman, the sixth largest arms manufacturer in the world, is in the news for a lawsuit made by an employee who worked on its never-fielded system to protect commercial air-liners from shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.
In 2006 this project was worth big money and the Department of Homeland Security issued a report on the subject, one that was posted on Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy blog. DHS complained the material was sensitive and Aftergood took down the paper.
I wrote about it here:
And upon perusal, it is possible to see why DHS might want to control its dissemination. The anti-MANPADS systems under consideration, manufactured by BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman for addition to commercial airliners, don’t work.
A few days after FAS’ posting of the report, Associated Press filed a story on it.
“It could be 20 years before every U.S. passenger airplane is outfitted with a system to protect it from small portable missiles, according to a government report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.Under a test program, BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman developed laser-based systems over the past two years that still don’t meet the reliability standards set by the Homeland Security Department . . . ” wrote the AP.
The upshot:
False alarms would cause the complete halt or disruption of commercial air traffic and the emptying of airports and surrounding areas in a search for terrorists. False alarms would cause notification of what is called the Domestic Event Network. The problems associated with false alarm of an anti-aircraft missile attack on a commercial jetliner could be said to be substantial, economically back-breaking, or worse than terrorists.
In any case, Reuters reports on Northrop Grumman’s anti-MANPADS project and the lawsuit over it:
A lawsuit by a former Northrop Grumman employee alleges that the defense contractor defrauded the U.S. government over a contract to provide commercial airliners with a missile defense system.
The suit, which was originally filed in 2009 by Leo Danilides, was unsealed in federal district court in Chicago on Thursday…
The suit was filed under the False Claims Act, which lets people collect rewards for blowing the whistle on fraud against the government …
Northrop received a contract in 2006 to provide improvements for work it had done in two earlier phases of the project “and “create a commercially feasible system,” according to the lawsuit. It said the plaintiff, Danilides, had worked on the program “for many years.”
The suit alleged that during the Phase III part of the project, for which it said the company was paid $62 million, “Northrop pretended to be exerting its best efforts when it was doing virtually nothing to improve the design and reliability of the Counter-MANPADS system.”
“Northrop failed to perform critical tasks, and then profited by keeping the money that was supposed to have been spent doing that work,” according to the allegations.
“Far from providing its ‘best efforts’ as required, Northrop was providing no efforts.”
By 2008 the contract had ended with no results and the government did not pursue more research.
Another reason why you read this blog: the nightmare years of the past decade when the Department of Defense and national security spending slipped out of civilian democratic control and oversight. And very few people cared.
Now look where we are.
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11.23.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 11:12 am by George Smith
Shannon Richardson, the Texas woman and sometime television extra who tried to frame her husband on a ricin beef by sending castor powder letters to the president and others, has entered a plea agreement with the government.
No terms have been announced. While in jail, Richardson gave birth to a child. She was originally charged with two counts of threats by mail.
Elsewhere, the two defendants at the center of the case of the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang have been in jail since the end of 2011. They still have not come to trial.
And Jeffery Levenderis, a destitute Ohio man, arrested when a jar with some castor mush was found in the refrigerator of a house he’d rented but no longer lived in, has been in jail, awaiting trial, since January 2011.
In trivial news earlier this month, an official from the Department of Homeland Security told Congress that one of the three ricin suspects arrested during the summer fad of letter-mailing, had also set up to sell something — that something undisclosed — on the closed Silkroute drug trading site. The name of the person was not given.
This was done as part of testimony that terrorists were availing themselves of the black drug site.
Using the three individuals (or at least one of them) arrested for castor-powder mailing this summer to demonstrate terrorist use on the Silkroute drug site is a really big stretch. But that’s how we roll.
Want an MP3 of “Ricin Mama” for your device? Click here. Be the first on your block to have the only blues rock tune about ricin mailing, ever!
Also featuring the only satirical use of video of Lee Atwater playing guitar with Steve Cropper (of Booker T. and the MG’s) and others.
With backstory, a real multi-media bonanza!
Tip jar.
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11.05.13
Posted in Decline and Fall, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 2:10 pm by George Smith
This would have never happened back when I started in the early Nineties.
No one would have been talking about ricin. And on the outside chance they were nobody would have thought much of it.
From Aiken, South Carolina:
Two Aiken High School students have been accused of conspiring to make ricin, according to the Aiken Department of Public Safety.
The leader of a school group notified police about some suspicious activity that took place while the group was on a field trip to the zoo and botanical gardens in Columbia, according to an incident report. The two students were heard discussing making ricin, a highly toxic protein produced in the seeds of the castor oil plant.
The students told their group they wanted to go to the botanical gardens at the zoo in order to find a castor oil plant, which is used to make ricin, the report stated. Other students confirmed the reports.
Each of the students told officers it was the other’s idea to find the plant and make the ricin, according to the report. The students’ parents were also contacted regarding the incident.
No charges will be filed, reads the newspaper, although the state and federal governments were contacted.
The students had no materials. “[An official] said the castor oil plant [at the botanical garden] was never touched,” it added.
The country is radically different than it was fifteen years ago.
Does anyone think this has been for the better?
What does it say about the nature of the national security megaplex and how average people and thought have been warped by it when two teenagers on a field trip make trivial talk about ricin, they’re overheard, reports are made and the federal government contacted?
And, worse, this is no longer seen as profoundly abnormal.
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10.31.13
Posted in Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 9:25 am by George Smith
Contrary to American war on terror mythology, castor seeds and ricin don’t make a good weapon. In fact, it is even harder than one might think to achieve simple poisoning.
A recent case of attempted suicide by a 37-year old woman using ricin had a happy ending, of sorts.
Excerpts from the news:
A suicidal North Logan woman who survived poisoning with the deadly ricin toxin earlier this month is getting another break: she will not be criminally charged.
North Park Police Chief Kim Hawkes confirmed Tuesday that the 37-year-old [Utah] woman, who ingested a large amount of ricin-laden castor beans on Oct. 3 in the basement apartment of a home in North Logan, was released from the hospital last week. — Salt Lake City newspaper
Police say around 10:30pm Wednesday night, a women living in a basement apartment at 2270 North 740 East attempted to commit suicide by boiling caster beans. When the woman boiled the beans, she created ricin. The fumes contaminated the home, putting the family of 4 upstairs at risk.
Police say the woman did eat some of the beans and was taken to the hospital. The family living upstairs was also taken to the hospital to get decontaminated from ricin gases. — KUTV
According to North Park Police Chief Kim Hawkes, the woman purchased about 60 castor beans from an Internet website about a month ago. After soaking the beans for 24 hours and then boiling them, the woman ingested about half of them, he said. — Kansas City newspaper
Proteins are denatured by heating. Ricin is a protein. And it is certain that it is destroyed by heat. Boiling the castor seeds is most probably what saved the woman’s life, although she was still hospitalized after eating 30 of them.
Boiling castor seeds does not produce ricin gas. A Hazmat team was summoned. No one except the woman was every really in any danger.
America used to process large amounts of castor seeds. The mills produced dusts and mash containing ricin. Neither killed workers.
In the Ricin Mama video, you can see workers in a foreign country heaving castor seeds into a grinder, the process producing clouds of powder, some of which must contain ricin.
“Soligenix, Inc. (OTCQB: SNGX) (Soligenix or the Company), a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing products to treat inflammatory diseases and biodefense medical countermeasures (MCMs) where there remains an unmet medical need, announced today submission of a full contract proposal to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases,” reads a press release from Soligenix today, a company that has been paid by the US government for over a decade to produce a ricin vaccine. “Successful award of the proposal would support a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract for the advanced development of RiVax™ as a vaccine MCM candidate for biodefense threats to protect the public.”
Soligenix’ stock is worth $1.94 a share today, down from a high of two dollars and fifty cents about a month ago.
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10.06.13
Posted in Bombing Moe, Bombing Paupers, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 12:45 pm by George Smith
The mighty US war on terror machine grinds on. Big news, big news, an allegedly important al Qaeda man, nabbed by US special forces in the failed state formerly known as Libya. Hate to rain on the parade. (Well, no, not really.)
Anas al Libi was a retiree from the Afghan war against the Soviets.
The picture now all over the news is misleading. Anas al Libi most probably does not look like that now.
Reads the New York Times today (no link):
American commandos carried out raids on Saturday in two far-flung African countries in a powerful flex of military muscle aimed at capturing fugitive terrorist suspects
[Anas al Libi’s] brother, Nabih, told The Associated Press that just after dawn prayers, three vehicles full of armed men had approached [his] home and surrounded him as he parked his car. The men smashed his window, seized his gun and sped away with him, the brother said.
Military muscle.
In 2000 al Libi was living in England when the British took the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” off him and gave it to the FBI. Al Libi was not arrested and later faded from sight, apparently leaving the country.
After 9/11, the US government started calling this book the “al Qaeda manual.” It’s what you used to see quoted from when authorities wanted to produce some evidence of the methods of mayhem used by al Qaeda. Photocopies were published, various edits of it have been posted around the web, by the GWB White House and, of course, here.
British authorities tried to use it in a famous ricin trial to establish that an “al Qaeda poison cell” was linked to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The US government also used the alleged “al Qaeda poison cell” as evidence in Colin Powell’s discredited UN Security Council exposition on the Saddam Hussein regime’s WMD programs and its connection with al Qaeda.
The British jury for the London ricin trial did not agree there was a poison cell (and the defense proved a ricin recipe seized in an anti-terror raid in England was not the same as that in al Libi’s “Manual of Afghan Jihad”) and found all of the Muslims rounded up as part of the alleged plot not guilty, except for one man.
Every regular knows I wrote about it extensively years ago.
Excerpted, from GlobalSecurity.Org:
It was the British prosecution’s aim to link the “UK poison cell” to al Qaida by associating its ricin and poisons recipes with documents of Afghan — read al Qaida — origin. It cited three documents of interest: the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” seized in an information gathering raid in Manchester in 2000, notes found in English and Russian in Kabul in 2001 and notes found in Kabul, written in Arabic, also in 2001.
In a mini-trial within the trial, the prosecution’s claims became unconvincing for a number of reasons. The “Manual of Afghan Jihad” was obtained in Manchester in April 2000 by British anti-terrorism agents and subsequently turned over to the FBI’s Nanette Schumaker later that month and contains sections on poisons. Its ricin recipe is clearly taken from Hutchkinson and Saxon and although it is of similar nature to the recipe in the Bourgas trial, it is not identical.
In the manner of details, the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” calls for the use of lye in the treatment of castor seeds. The use of lye was subsequently dropped for many methods found in terrorist literature and it also does not appear in the Bourgass recipe. Other portions of the “Jihad” recipe straighforwardly descend from Hutchkinson, including the reference to DMSO. And still other fine details separate it from the Kamel Bourgass formulation.
A further knock on the “Manual of Afghan Jihad” as an al Qaida source comes from its apparent origin in the first jihad against the Communist occupation of Afghanistan, prior to al Qaida. The “Manual of Afghan Jihad” was the property of Nazib al Raghie, also known as Anas Al Liby to the US government. At the time the manual was taken off al Raghie in Britain, UK authorities were not interested in him. Neither, apparently, was the FBI and he was not arrested. These days, al Raghie, as Al Liby, is on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists.
The “Manual of Afghan Jihad’s” ricin recipe was fairly obviously not the same as the one presented as evidence in the trial and a representative of the defense added that its appellation as an “al Qaida manual” was and is an invention of the United States government. More to the point, it was the work of the Department of Justice because nowhere in the manual is the word “al Qaida” mentioned although one could find it entitled as such on the DoJ website copy.
Summary: Anas al Libi (or Anas al Liby) was once, perhaps accurately, described privately by an expert for the defense in the London ricin trial as a pensioner from the Afghan wars.
He owned the copy of the so-called “al Qaeda manual” that used to be famous.
Anas al Libi has probably not been doing much of anything for years. He finally returned home, his capture partly the result of the turning of Libya into a failed state.
Go team. We expect nothing less than the description of great victories and legerdemain in the removal of poverty-stricken fly dirt.
The capture of Anas al Libi illustrates the working policy of the US government in open-ended military operations.
American special forces can roam the world, easily finding permission to snatch or kill any relative nobody as long as they are deemed problematical, in any failed or failing state, almost always those with warring tribes of Muslims.
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09.13.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 8:45 am by George Smith
From a Clueless Old Fool Who Time Has Passed By, a LOL moment as he sends advice to “jihadis” he no longer has:
(Reuters) In an audio speech released online a day after the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 strikes, Ayman Zawahri said attacks ‘by one brother or a few of the brothers’ would weaken the U.S. economy by triggering big spending on security … ‘We should bleed America economically by provoking it to continue in its massive expenditure on its security, for the weak point of America is its economy, which has already begun to stagger due to the military and security expenditure …”
You’d laugh harder if work force participation weren’t the lowest since, well — ever, and there weren’t already 48 million Americans on food stamps due to our corporate Zawahiris.
No link.
Next week, a new issue of al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, with another special on how to set fires in national parks, urinate in ice machines at motels, yell “fire” in crowded theaters, and sneeze in salad bars when you have the flu this winter.
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08.15.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 3:11 pm by George Smith
After more than 20 years of writing on specialized matters in national security, I’ve come up with a theorem that works on all things American.
The megastructure that now makes the national security a commodity has completely warped the thinking of Americans, from the top to the bottom.
So much so that it’s evident and can be described in a fairly simple rule, one that describes much of the war on terror and the American business of threat-seeking.
And here it is:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news.
Or, put another way, the probability that something bad will happen, as described or predicted by experts or any government, intelligence or quasi-corporate/government assessment agency, asymptotically approaches zero as it attains widespread use in popular entertainments. (And that’s usually very early in the development cycle.)
Therefore, you can bet your sweet bippy there’s never going to be an electronic Pearl Harbor, or an electromagnetic pulse attack, or a national blackout caused by Chinese hackers, or people dieing from a ricin mailing even though it’s so easy to make. And al Qaeda does not come back from being hided for more than a decade. No one gets a second chance.
Summed up: Too many bad movies, too much bad television, too much fear-making as edutainment, passed off as serious news, advised by bad people slumming from the national security industry, their purpose primarily maximization of employment. Everything touched by it, tainted by an intrinsic badness. And it is definitely not supported by the real world but must be maintained by a uniquely American machinery of manipulations, lies and purposeful technology-mediated confusion.
And thanks to Frank’s Pine View Farm where I’ve been working it out in commentary.
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