02.22.13
The Weekly Intelligence Report
A brilliant idea, Susie! It’s time has come.
Hat tip to Pine View Farm.
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Debris from the war on terror years
Early in the week I received an e-mail query about the old Mujahideen Poisons Handbook. Many readers will remember it as a .pdf pamphlet that figured prominently the US government’s and media’s received wisdoms passed out on al Qaeda and its capabilities with regards to weapons of mass destruction.
A historian was asking where to find a clean copy because she was writing a book about “popular manuals and their challenges to free speech. She explained this went back into the 19th century.
Loompanics, an American publisher based in Port Townsend, Washington, specialized in fringe books on mayhem and other unsavory topics. It was part of this literature in the United States, although its heyday ran only from the mid-Seventies to the early Nineties.
When the digital networks began to arrive in the early Nineties bits of the detritus from Loompanics and other fringe US publishers were copied into cyberspace, usually by young men, and distributed out of their bedroom-based bulletin board systems.
This copied samizdat electronic literature went around the world.
Paradoxically, this phenomenon and the rise of the web put Loompanics out of business. Which wasn’t a bad thing considering the collateral cost in ruined lives possession of the works of Loompanics and other similar publishers has caused as a result of the war on terror.
Free speech guarantees the right to publish odious materials of little social value. But there can be severe random and unintended costs associated with it.
The war on terror produced such things and continues to do so.
Specifically, with regards to Loompanics, the brief e-mail discussion
dealt with the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook.
I refuted it often around the middle of the decade, most famously when it showed up in a Sunday feature at the Washington Post on “e-Qaeda” and how the terror organization was using the web to train its minions.
The graphic above is the Post’s. It was utter trash on the making of “betaluminium poison,” presented as a real potential menace, evidence of a real capability where none existed.
‘”[Contrary] to the Post story line, the cited library materials suggest a startling lack of technical competence,” wrote Steve Aftergood in his Secrecy News Bulletin. “Unfortunately, the Post did not critically examine the materials that it presented.”
Specifically, the bit on “betaluminium” was a garbled excerpt on botulism from a Loompanics book, Maxwell Hutchkinson’s (a pseudonym) The Poisoner’s Handbook. (On which I’ve regrettably written quite a bit.)
Most of the information in both the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook and Hutchkinson’s Poisoner’s Handbook is laughable in terms of accurate chemistry and biology. However, over the decade, many counter-terror and police forces never got that.
And you couldn’t tell them.
Perhaps it was too inconvenient to the time and their purposes to admit to such things. Or maybe their analyses were just always done by “experts” who were really incompetent.
Both pamphlets were apparently written/composed/put together by people who seemed to have very little idea about chemical or biological terrorism, or poisoning, but wished to create appearances that they did. They wrote as if they had performed procedures that simply do not adhere to reality.
Nevertheless, these writings became documents that put you away, ruining a life and reputation once news is published and convictions handed down.
In England they became seditious materials, a crime to possess because they fell into the category of things deemed likely to be of material use to terrorists.
In the United States, possession of recipes or related materials copied from them and other similar publications are always presented as evidence of intent to commit acts of terrorism in domestic trials.
I’ve been consulted in three such trials on these publications and recipes, two in England years ago. And more recently, one which is set to run soon in Georgia.
The Washington Post’s story, published in 2005 and written by Steve Coll and Susan B. Glasser, was not the only mainstream news organization that disseminated ridiculous claims on the nature of these types of documents and what they allegedly showed al Qaeda could do. Many did it, far too many.
But the Post’s article, by dint of the importance of the newspaper, puts it in the forefront in terms of the damage it did to public information and perception on these things.
During the war on terror, al Qaeda never possessed the capability to make weapons of mass destruction. The best it could manage was apparently videotaping, very early on, the cruel killing of a puppy with cyanide in a room used as a gas chamber.
However, the government and very-important-person thinking on the matter was just the opposite.
They were very wrong. And if they continue to think such things, they still are. The Post’s reporters and editors, and too many others to count in the mainstream media, got it all wrong.
In 2005, Steve Coll won the Pulitzer for his book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Today he is the president of the New America Foundation, “a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States.”
The belief that weapons of mass destruction can be simply made from recipes included in the publications of the American fringe, migrated to the desperate places of the world, is now irreversibly embedded in our culture.
I see it almost every week, from ex-anti-virus king John McAfee’s ridiculous stories about Hezbollah using Belize and Nicaragua to ship massive amounts of ricin powder into the United States to a new television movie in England called Complicit, a drama dealing with a “jihadist plot to smuggle ricin … from Egypt to the UK with a view to killing thousands …”
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02.21.13
Got blood?
Death toll from 9/11: 2,753.
Killed by drones, the US count, today: 4,700
Bombing the destitute in the desperate places of the world, assorted “bad guys” and whoever happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, ad libitum forever, is one great global strategy.
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Ted’s so black
Like all good citizens of WhiteManistan, Ted Nugent just can’t figure out why African-Americans don’t love him (or them). And hate Barack Obama, the Hitler Commie. That is because it is obvious that it’s the President who is the sworn enemy of black America. Kind of like when Glenn Beck was always trying to get people to buy he was just like MLK.
Nugent’s column, from WND, the conspiracy/birther news website, is excerpted for choice bits:
The destruction of blacks has been engineered by President Obama’s party for at least the last 50 years. The New Deal was a raw deal, and The Great Society experiment didn’t turn out to be so great after all. It has been an unmitigated disaster for black Americans …
The truth is that the Democratic Party has been the engineer of the destruction of black Americans, and everyone knows it except the very people who need to know it the most – black Americans.
The turbo-destruction will continue for black Americans until they realize that dirty Democrat politicians are their true enemy …
I don’t celebrate Black History Month. I celebrate it every day, as my very black-inspired musical dreams …
There is no doubt that my 2013 tour will be the best of my life. With world-class virtuosos paying tribute to our black heroes nightly, it is only fitting that this year’s tour is aptly titled, “Ted Nugent Black Power 2013.??? Say it loud: my music is black and I’m proud!
Practically speaking, Nugent has been singing this embarrassing tune for years, mostly in an unsuccessful effort to combat the image that he’s a bigot.
Nugent has always been black America’s best friend, insisting in a recent column that all people on public assistance should be disenfranchised, that he and white gun-owners would be the new Rosa Parkses and that Martin Luther King day is his favorite holiday.
It’s truly the stuff of genius, blandishments so ridiculous as to reduce one to tetany. And in the face of continuing derision, like all good people of WhiteManistan, Ted just turns up the volume on the stupid.
Yep, he’s certainly very black.
John Sinclair, manager of the MC5, and one of the original “stinky hippies,??? according to Nugent, describing the scene around the Grande Ballroom in Detroit in the Sixties:
JOHN SINCLAIR: That’s what it was like back then … everybody smoked, nobody snitched, everyone was cool — except for Ted Nugent. He was not cool, always an asshole, everybody hated him (laughs).
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Rotten peanuts
The wheels of justice grind slowly.
The Bush administration spent a great deal of time in office building up homeland security defenses against mostly-imagined threats in biological and chemical terrorism.
On the domestic side it did all it could to destroy food safety by getting rid of regulators.
The years of the Bush presidency could be characterized in many ways, all bad, one being the recurring feature of a surprising number off mass illnesses caused by contamination in food products.
For example, the killing of a large number of beloved pets by mass distribution of melamine as an adulterant in their food.
In this climate, the Peanut Corporation of American, run by Stewart Parnell, caused one of the biggest outbreaks of salmonellosis in the country’s history. The outbreak killed nine people and sickened hundreds.
By contrast, anthrax bioterrorist Bruce Ivins killed five and made 17 others very ill.
A federal grand jury indicted four former employees of a peanut company linked to a 2009 salmonella outbreak that killed nine people and sickened hundreds, leading to one of the largest recalls in history.
The 76-count indictment was unsealed Wednesday in federal court in Georgia. It charged the former employees of Virginia-based Peanut Corp. of America with conspiracy, wire fraud, obstruction of justice and others offenses related to contaminated or misbranded food.
Named in the indictment were company owner Stewart Parnell, his brother and company vice president Michael Parnell, Georgia plant manager Samuel Lightsey and Georgia plant quality assurance manager Mary Wilkerson.
FDA inspectors found remarkably bad conditions inside Parnell’s processing plant in Blakely, Ga., including mold and roaches, and the company went bankrupt after the recall …
Stewart Parnell, who invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before Congress in February 2009, once directed employees to “turn them loose” after samples of peanuts had tested positive for salmonella and then were cleared in a second test, according to e-mail uncovered at the time by congressional investigators.
The indictment cited emails sent between defendants talking about contamination in the product.
Stewart Parnell was subsequently eclipsed by Austin ‘Jack’ Decoster, an Iowa egg farmer with a history of violations who caused the biggest recall of eggs in US history when his products delivered Salmonella enteriditis in 2010.
Decoster’s egg farms were directly responsible for sickening 1,500 — 2,000, or more, and the recall of almost 400 million eggs.
DD blog covered some it in the series puckishly entitled Eat Shit Farms, here.
Decoster was subsequently dragged in front of Congress by the pathetic ex-Democratic Party Congressman, Bart Stupak, for a grilling when the latter was chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Committee.
Good times, good times. Beware bioterrorism!
Trivia note: Bart Stupak became momentarily famous for trying to attach an anti-abortion amendment to the Affordable Care Act. He subsequently declined to run again, apparently frazzled by the enmity directed at him from women’s reproductive rights organizations. Stupak is now a lobbyist.
Stewart Parnell and Peanut Corp. — from the archives.
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02.20.13
WhiteManistan polled by Reuters
The equivalent of an Internet troll posting, Reuters polled a whole “1,443 Americans over the age of 18,” coming up with the statistic that a majority — about 53 percent of the citizenry wants illegals deported.
Not where I’m from. And cleaving to that stupid notion resulted in the destruction of the GOP in the state.
The piece, here, has John McCain trying to explain things to his WhiteManistan constituency in Arizona:
Republican Senator John McCain, one of the eight senators in the group, had his own encounter with citizens angered by illegal immigration on Tuesday when residents of his state of Arizona complained bitterly at a town hall meeting about the lack of security on the border with Mexico.
One man asked why troops had not been deployed to the border.
“Why didn’t the army go down there and stop them? Because the only thing that stops them I’m afraid to say, and it’s too damn bad, is a gun,” the man said.
Another resident, Keith Smith, got into a testy exchange with McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential candidate whose views on immigration have fluctuated over the years.
“Cut off their welfare and all their stuff and they’ll go back,” Smith said, referring to undocumented workers.
McCain had been trying to explain his position: “You’re not telling these people the truth. They mow our lawns, they care for our babies, they clean … that’s what those people do,” he said.
They pick the fruit and vegetables in the fields here, are the gardeners, the janitors, the house cleaners, and they’re not on welfare.
Why can’t they send “the troops” to the border? Get the guns, Homer! Zeb Colter for President, 2016! This isn’t the land of debris, it’s the land of the free, dammit!
And anyone here think WhiteManistan is too harsh a mock?
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‘The land of debris …”
You know the GOP and Tea Party brands are well and truly shot when professional wrestling takes their WhiteManistan ideology for a character heel.
Zeb Colter, formerly known as the entertaining pro wrestler, Dutch Mantell.
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02.16.13
Cans and cans of shoeshine
The cyberwar shoeshine crowd takes holidays. But when not on holiday it fabricates and dissembles almost non-stop, often in the most absurd ways.
From the well-known publication, on every newsstand you know, Infosecurity magazine:
A national survey of Americans shows that a majority fear that cyber warfare is imminent and that the country will attack or be attacked in the next decade. In addition, Americans believe both the government and private sector networks are ill-prepared for a surge in cyber conflict.
A poll by Tenable Network Security, which works with the US Department of Defense and military and government clients globally, found that the increasingly strong rhetoric about a “cyber Pearl Harbor??? and cyber attacks being the modern-day equivalent of nuclear weapons is apparently having an effect on the nation’s psyche.
Modern day equivalent of nuclear weapons.
Now you know why I find a lot of people who work in the national computer security machine contemptible.
Anyway, a poll conducted by a cyberwar defense firm, Tenable, whose business is contracts on the taxpayer dime, just happens to find that a majority of Americans believe cyberwar is imminent. I bet you’d have a hard time making that one stick in a random sampling at any burger joint in Pasadena.
This is how it works. Guys who worked at the National Security Agency, whose leader is famous for claims that cyberwar is causing the greatest transfer of wealth in history, disappearing the future of all Americans, leave and go into business selling the same warped story.
All in the effort to grease expanding budgets on cyberwar defense from which they will personally profit.
The shoeshine boys of cyberwar have done this kind of thing for a decade and a half, at least. I just didn’t have an insulting enough name for them previously.
[iDefense went bankrupt and ceased operation a few years ago. Its CEO’s bizarre proclamations, however, deserve preservation.]
James Adams was highly quotable on what would happen in cyberwar. No one in the mainstream press cast even the slightest fishy eye at his claims, most of which were laughably absurd.
Here then, is a small sampling of James Adams …
Pentagon hackers employed in Eligible Receiver “did more than the massed might of Saddam Hussein’s armies, than the Nazis in the Second World War.” From Techweek, 1999.
“iDefense is way ahead of the competition.” From Washington Technology, “the business newspaper for government systems integrators,” November 1999.
“Which brings us to the final rung on the escalatory ladder: the virtual equivalent of nuclear deployment. I offer as illustration Eligible Receiver.” From a speech, “The Future of War, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, June 2000.
‘Nuff said.
The shoeshine boys of cyberwar — from the archives.
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02.15.13
The Day of the Drones — no debate
As mentioned yesterday, the state of the debate on drone use is zero. There is no debate, none is allowed. While you don’t have to go three yards in the grass roots web media to hear one, all the very important people and the US government cannot be influenced by it.
Excerpts from a Daily Beat piece tell you all you need to know:
Yet despite the testy exchanges and the theatrical protests [by Code Pink ladies who were ejected], it’s worth noting that not a single senator said he or she opposed targeted killings. It was perhaps a recognition that drones are here to stay—a permanent part of America’s hi-tech 21st-century arsenal. Indeed, instead of a dramatic moral showdown, the hearing showcased evidence that Congress and the Obama administration could be moving toward pragmatic compromises …
Consider the lethal targeting of Anwar al Awlaki, the American citizen and al Qaeda member who was killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. Awlaki was actually placed on the kill list before the Justice Department had finished its opinion, though Obama’s lawyers had already weighed in orally. As for due process, it was far more informal than anything Feinstein envisions. One example: before State Department legal adviser Harold Koh was willing to give his blessing to the deliberate killing of an American, even one who had joined an enemy force, he wanted to scrutinize the intelligence himself. So in March 2010, he holed up in a secure room in the State Department and pored over hundreds of pages of classified reports detailing Awlaki’s alleged involvement in terror plots. Koh had set his own standard to justify the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen: he felt that Awlaki would have to be shown to be “evil,??? with iron-clad intelligence to prove it. After absorbing the chilling intel, which included multiple bombing plots and elaborate plans to attack Americans with ricin and cyanide, Koh concluded that Awlaki was not just evil; he was “satanic.???
In one paragraph, the meretricious rationalization cited yesterday, the line of allegation always used to steamroll thoughtful discussion:
Technology has advanced so far, the little tribes of really poor people, even single individuals, can develop weapons of mass destruction.
In this case, the old boogieman, Anwar al-Alaki — now dead, elevated to “satanic power,” out in the desert wastes of Yemen, virtually dead broke and without any infrastructure, allegedly capable of making a ricin WMD.
Castor seeds, which are where one gets ricin, cannot make a weapon of mass destruction. Indeed, no one has ever made a WMD from ricin, or even made a convincing stab at one.
Yet these are the types of horrendous distortions, now used as received wisdom, for the virtual justification of pre-emptive attacks in the desperate and destitute places of the world.
There is no way to see an end to it.
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02.14.13
Drones — not as bad as measles
Homeland Security magazine, edited by Dan Verton, had an interesting piece on the issue of domestic drones the other day. It mentioned that lower level grass roots opposition had canceled a police drone program in Seattle.
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn on Feb. 6, announced the cancellation of the Seattle Police Department’s controversial surveillance drone program after citizens and civil liberties groups voiced concerns about privacy.
McGinn joins a growing list of state and local officials who are buckling under extreme pressure from their constituents and privacy advocates who argue that police departments are moving too far, too fast, on drone deployments without concrete policies and procedures to safeguard the privacy of law-abiding citizens.
State legislatures around the country are also stepping up activities designed to limit or ban the use of domestic surveillance drones. To date, Florida, Maine, Montana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Virginia have introduced anti-drone bills.
Domestic drones are financed by block grants from the Department of Homeland Security. They are part of a much larger phenomenon, one which has seen national taxpayer dollars pay for the military weaponization of small local police forces.
Locally, a good example was the acquisition of an armored car last year by the South Pasadena police force.
Called a Peacekeeper, I wrote about it here.
All the hardware, drones now included, becomes appealing to police forces because it appears free. That is, the cost is distributed over the entire population. Like food stamps, only the dollars spent on drones aren’t funneled back into the community as food buys at the local markets.
It’s a racket.
Homeland Security interviewed longtime colleague Steven Aftergood, author and keeper of the Secrecy blog, had this to say to the magazine:
“It’s a dynamic situation that is subject to change,” said Aftergood. “Industry clearly had a head start, with strong support in Congress and a rosy view of the future full of potential applications for unmanned aerial systems. But privacy values are deeply rooted in society and will have to be addressed by all parties. The debate cannot be avoided indefinitely. It needs to be engaged directly.”
Aftergood is correct. There does need to be a debate and there is already a groundswell of noise on the matter.
However, it comes from all the sources the US government ignores. And nothing good will happen until major news sources start covering drones without just going to the usual experts, chosen from defense think tanks, whose job it is to be fuglemen — wingmen — for whatever the national security machine is pushing.
The argument presented by the side of evil, the forces recommending more and more drones, is one in which they are presented as great and inexorable technological advances, things which make war less bloody.
The technology is not spectacular. And the argument obfuscates by not framing it within an expanded context of American and global reality.
This expanded view recognizes that that the US government/military has moved to take on the role of prosecuting special operations against whomever it thinks necessary in all the desperate and poor corners of the world. War on terror is the rationalization.
This has nothing to do with technology. It is to keep the industries of war moving. It is also is linked to a meme which has become pernicious received wisdom: Technology has advanced so far, the little tribes of really poor people, even single individuals, can develop weapons of mass destruction.
I’ve spent close to a decade as something called a Senior Fellow for GlobalSecurity.Org arguing that’s not true, that it’s a construct that has been passed off because it’s a semantic weapon for the national security industry, one used to steamroll thoughtful discussion.
Drones don’t operate in an environment where the purported adversary has any equivalent technology, or usually, even much of an infrastructure. They are used against populations that cannot mount a conventional defense because they are destitute. Or, as in Pakistan where an air defense could perhaps, theoretically, be mounted, allowed by bribing the government into non-interference over the regions of the poorest with weapon sales and cash assistance.
There is a moral issue in that and the United States is not on the right side of it.
I wrote above that the “debate” on drones has not been such a thing. It is not hard to find dismay and counterargument at the grass roots level.
However, the formal “debate,” what little there is of it, is dominated by the hand puppets of the American government and national security apparatus.
This week, Matt Taibbi’s blog at Rolling Stone points out an instance, one in which a “scholar” you’ve never heard of at one of America’s old but now given-over-to-flacking think-tanks, rationalizing drones using a most tortured comparison:
Read an absolutely amazing article today. Entitled “Droning on about Drones,” it was published in the online version of Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest and most widely read English-language newspaper, and written by one Michael Kugelman, identified as the Senior Program Associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
In this piece, the author’s thesis is that all this fuss about America’s drone policy is overdone and perhaps a little hysterical. Yes, he admits, there are some figures that suggest that as many as 900 civilians have been killed in drone strikes between 2004 and 2013. But, he notes, that only averages out to about 100 civilians a year. Apparently, we need to put that number in perspective:
“Now let’s consider some very different types of statistics.”In 2012, measles killed 210 children in Sindh. Karachiites staged numerous anti-drones protests last year, but I don’t recall them holding any rallies to highlight a scourge that was twice as deadly for their province’s kids than drone strikes were for Pakistani civilians.”Nor do I recall any mass action centered around unsafe water. More people in Karachi die each month from contaminated water than have been killed by India’s army since 1947 . . . 630 Pakistani children die from water-borne illness every day (that’s more than three times the total number of Pakistani children the BIJ believes have died from drone strikes since 2004).”
Adds Taibbi: “So there it is, folks. Welcome to the honor of American citizenship. Should we replace E Pluribus Unum with We Don’t Kill as Many Children as Measles? Of course people aren’t mad about bombs being dropped on them from space without reason; they’re mad because anti-Americanism is alluring!”
There’s nothing to add.
Well, there is actually. You can expand the argument to justify drone use just about everywhere in the impoverished world.
Malaria kills [five figures] each year [some country in Africa. Drones, by contrast, have only killed 140.
Roll your own, arguing drone fatalities as something less horrid than many of the world’s most famous diseases. And therefore OK.
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