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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10.04.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 1:55 pm by George Smith
The latest from Edward Snowden is an inadvertant comedy routine with the NSA as the funny-men. If the GOP hadn’t thrown a monkey wrench into the US government, triggered the layoffs of 800,000 and the economic loss of 300 million a day, his leaked documents would still be hot shit. Now, not so much.
Three thousand were laid off at Lockheed today, casualties of government shut down. Perhaps some were in the cyberwar unit. Probably not, though.
Anyway, from CNET:
The National Security Agency has been trying to crack the online anonymity provided by Tor, a US-funded Internet tool designed to keep Net activity private and said to be widely used by dissidents in oppressive countries, as well as by terrorists. That’s according to the latest secret intelligence documents drawn from the cache leaked by Edward Snowden and published by the UK’s Guardian newspaper.
The NSA hasn’t been able to crack Tor outright, but through various means it’s been able to “de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users,” says an internal NSA document quoted by the Guardian.
This graphic is the best, a slide with an evil terrorist in a mask with an assault gun slung over his shoulder, accessing the Tor network!
It’s not even up to the snuff of the worst comic book.
At left, very naughty person.
But to the root of the matter, the obsession that terrorists are everywhere (now childishly called “bad people” and “very naughty people,” rendering the impression that the national security nerds working for the NSA are just as you think they might be — weird and stunted) and that, gosh, they’re using the Tor network.
Back track about two years.
GlobalSecurity.Org installed a paywall and found, when comparing user logs before and after, that a great deal of their regular users — or traffic — was going right through it.
I was asked to have a look.
There are paywalls, cheap and expensive, and the cheap and medium-priced ones are really easy to get through. And the top line, the best exemplified by the New York Times, harder to trivially circumvent. (Although it’s not really impossible to see what you want on the NY Times, even when you’re over the limit, without much trickery. Google the story, someone will have linked to it, go there and enter — the Times doesn’t count in traffic from a referral against your score.)
Anyway, one easy way to get through the GlobalSecurity paywall was to use a proxy anonymizer. The Tor network was perfect for it.
Paradoxically, Tor was developed by the Department of Defense. And the majority of GlobalSecurity.Org’s traffic, or regular users, are people who work for DoD, the intelligence agencies, or defense contractors.
A lot of them were apparently using Tor.
Ha-ha. Wow! Revealed, the NSA trying to unravel and attack the efficiency of Tor to find … Americans, “very naughty people,” in the employ of the national security megaplex.
Ha-ha-ho-ho-hee-hee! A real rib-tickler: “[Said] to be widely used by dissidents in oppressive countries, as well as by terrorists.”
Watch out! Sneaky enemies everywhere! Terrorism! Go NSA hacker dudes, go! Protect the nation from cyberwar!
Repeat the mantra: China, asymmetric, cyberspying, al Qaeda, hacking, very naughty people, Keith Alexander, power grid, intellectual property theft, greatest transfer of wealth in history! ORLY!
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, WhiteManistan at 7:43 am by George Smith
The cause of failed state government in the United States is WhiteManistan.
From a letter published in the Allentown Morning Call:
President Obama could have prevented this shutdown by demonstrating leadership qualities (which he sorely lacks) and by sitting down with the Republican leaders in Congress to try to work out a compromise. Instead, he and the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate (namely, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid), resorted to name-calling directed at the Republicans (“anarchists,” “extortionists,” etc.) rather than trying to work out a compromise …
In hindsight, the American people lost out on the opportunity to have prevented all this controversy had they elected Mitt Romney president. He would have been a uniter instead of a divider, a problem-solver instead of a problem-creator.
If only Mitt Romney, not written but still uttered — the white man — had won, the guy who implemented an equivalent of Obamacare in Massachusetts. (And in Pennsylvania, he lost, too.)
The tribe of WhiteManistan cannot abide two elections in which the majority chose that black man, Barack Obama. It bedevils them, they despise him, make no bones of it and consider everyone who voted for him a traitor and/or a parasite. And so it has steadily used weakness in the design of the US government to undermine government and stage a coup, a rebellion, which — if successful, effectively destroys his presidency.
That’s more than half of what paralyzing the government and threatening to blow the foundations is about. The undisguised malice toward the black man in the White House cannot be separated from the shut down and threats over the debt ceiling. Only terrible people overlook the animus and pretend its over philosophical differences on the role of government in providing health insurance.
And so they have made a unique civil war, one in which the armies don’t fire on each other, the bodies don’t pile up, the separation and secession isn’t geographic north and south, but still in entire states and the difference between a many-colored America and a mono-colored one where others still know their place.
Make no mistake, they were always aching for a Fort Sumter, it has been slowly coming for years. Now it’s here.
There’s no remedy for it until they are completely driven from the field. There’s no shared future American experience that includes the contributions of WhiteManistan, only the toleration of its long goodbye. They know it, too.
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10.03.13
Posted in Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 4:04 pm by George Smith
Big media mainstreamed Ted Nugent. And he’s only a symptom. So if the government defaults in two weeks and remains closed, a good many, not just in the GOP, brought it on by making rabid old paranoid white lunatics a common and respected American brand.
From Ted Nugent, made a celebrity on network television and in the Washington Post, today an expected advocate for shutting down the government forever, except for the military, police, prison guards and executioners:
“The 1970s Chrylser automobiles that wouldn’t run couldn’t hold a candle to the engineered obsolescence of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, the laughable U.S. post office, the jackboot indecency of the EPA, the ESA (this isn’t even an agency, it’s the Endangered Species Act, law), OSHA, USFW, USDA, NPS, USFS, NEA, FDA, [the] BLM … Who the hell came up with the government providing school lunches, food stamps, cellphones, rent, fuel, wars on drugs, wars on poverty, mismanaging forests, running parks … Go ahead, do us all a huge favor, and put the brakes on the America that never should have been. I watch the $6 billion school lunch program to feed the starving children go straight into the dumpster and right out to the local landfill.”
Shorter: Die! Die! Everybody but the shut-‘er-downers die! Die two or three times, especially school lunches.
No link.
He’s a sociopath, a bigot, ignorant beyond belief, a horrendous writer and public speaker, a well-paid and influential star who accurately reflects the sentiments of many.
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10.02.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath at 3:50 pm by George Smith
Plutocrat bankers, including Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, met at the White House with the Prez, really worried about the GOP monsters they worked hard to set loose because of the guy who dared say a few cross words to them a few years ago:
“Blankfein and other bank CEOs said they told the president they agree the long-term consequences of a shutdown would grow ‘extremely adverse’ if the U.S. fails raise its borrowing capacity.”
Among them, Robert Benmosche, CEO of AIG, notably called out as a sociopath by Paul Krugman, on the opinion pages of the New York Times a week ago.
A capital investment.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, WhiteManistan at 9:05 am by George Smith
Tom Clancy has died, astonishingly, at 66.
I was a very much younger man when I bought the first hardback edition of The Hunt for Red October from the Naval Institute Press. It quickly became a best-seller, propelled by blurb furnished by Ronald Reagan.
The rest of the story is known to everyone.
Clancy became the leading author of the techno-military thriller genre — he almost invented it single-handedly — essentially, bodice-ripper fiction for men where the romance is in the story of the military supremacy of the US, always struck low in the beginning of a usually not less then 400-page tale, then rising on the shoulders of brave and resourceful officers and enlisted men, or spies, to crush the enemy.
There were blockbuster movies, computer games, probably even a television show, an empire created.
I haven’t read any of it in decades and now might only have the Red October book, somewhere in a hidden pile.
Frankly, it was always pretty much crap but shite that was very appealing to a emotionally stunted but large young to middle-aged white male audience, jingo dudes who got erections over loving technical descriptions of advanced American weapons of war as they were in the process of destroying “the bad guys.” (The latter of which Dave Barry lampooned in an hilarious column a long time ago).
Another way of putting it: Tom Clancy was very dear to the beating heart of WhiteManistan.
I outgrew it and got rid the books, even those of the coat-tailing authors, of which there were and are still way too many.
Still respect must be paid to the achievement and regret shown over his passing too soon. Clancy’s millions of books made people happy, including me, for a bit. And just a day ago I noticed a newer title by the man in the one place where many Americans are still most likely to buy an occasional book — the grocery store.
Clancy was the original. Rest in Peace.
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10.01.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 11:57 am by George Smith
In honor of the despised minority who closed the US government because of their hatred for the President and the fair passage of law, a photo tribute collected from newspapers in the last few days.
Hector Heathcote rings his liberty bell a week or so before hundreds of thousands of tyrannical federal employees are sent home and the US government slowly grinds to a halt. Freedom at last.
Some of the men of the Second Revolt. God Bless America. Slight surge in sales of Hector Heathcote costumes begins.
Battle on, older white patriots and freedom fighters! Your cause has been the most noble in the land. “At the National Institutes of Health, nearly three-quarters of the staff was furloughed.” The same is happening to the Centers for Disease Control! Moochers whose jobs are just a symptom of bloated, out of control government.
Well done, men of WhiteManistan! In your tireless effort to preserve our freedoms and liberties, you made an older lady cry:
“Michael Mueller, a retired visitor from Arizona, and his wife Bea had planned their trip to New York for six months. Instead, she was left in tears at what she said should be the last thing to close.”
The bill for the 2010 elections comes due.
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09.30.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 2:48 pm by George Smith
The pure milk of American patriotism, run out of southern California, fortunately.
A couple times a week I stand behind a woman, sometimes with a child or two, using a WIC (Women, Infants and Children supplemental food program) check at my supermarket.
A government shutdown stops them. And after about a week, unless states take local measures, there’s nothing in the pipeline.
Let’s give lots of thumbs-ups to the Tea Party/GOP for getting WIC moochers as collateral damage in effort to engineer a coup over health care and that guy in the White House they hate with every fiber of their being. Shutdown won’t get the food stamps program — drat, it may have to wait for default in mid-October — but it can still start clawing poor women and children tomorrow.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall, Psychopath & Sociopath, WhiteManistan at 2:34 pm by George Smith
Shut down the government! Because Paul Revere, Hector Heathcote and the rest of those old founding guys knew that a life of fifes, drums, tri-corner hats, wooden teeth and typhus, anything, was better than health care for more people.
“What do you mean Hector Heathcote wasn’t a real patriot?!”
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Posted in Rock 'n' Roll at 2:07 pm by George Smith
“Baby Blue,” an aching pop rock single that went to #14 in the USA in 1972, played in edited form at the close of Breaking Bad last night, was perfect. Right to its poignant rising final guitar flourish, so exquisitely compressed you hear string noise as the show fades to black, it’s a song that put to music loss, regret, and now — meth and death.
Badfinger was a tragedy. Despite singles success with Apple Records (Come and Get It, No Matter What, Day by Day and Baby Blue), the dissolution of the Beatles’ company and the withdrawal of a record from the American market seven weeks after release in 1974 left the band with no income. Despondent, Pete Ham — the voice of “Baby Blue,” committed suicide by hanging the same year.
Another bandmember, bassist Tom Evans, hung himself in 1983.
By tomorrow rock critics at all the on-line magazines will have picked over the song and the band, ruining it if you paid attention.
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