Noted...

Sorry for being away from the keyboard for such an extended period of time, but for much of this day I didn't have one. A keyboard, that is. Bloody things choose the worst times to go out on you.

FBI rubout. It's starting to seem as though the Bureau is out to kill everyone involved with the Boston bombing case. And yes, I know I said I didn't want to talk about this incident any further -- but you have to admit: The latest news is really, really weird.

We've been given two very dissimilar tales about the death of Ibragim Todashev, associate of the Tsarnaevs. In the first version, Ibragim went for a knife; in the second, a ceremonial sword.

Perhaps more importantly, we were first told that Agents were pressuring him to confess to...something. In version two, we are told...

Todashev became violent as he was signing a written statement based on his confession to the triple murder...

That's a pretty big damn difference. Did he confess or not? Why wouldn't the guy demand a lawyer?

In the most recent version, the sword (originally a knife) has become a broomstick. Perhaps tomorrow the feds will claim that Ibragim rushed forward with a banana, leaving the agents with no choice but to unleash the tiger.

Marcy Wheeler is taking a careful look at this bizarre incident, and she has picked up on another notable oddity:

When the FBI first admitted that it had killed Ibragim Todashev, it indicated there were at least 5 people at the scene: Two Massachusetts State cops, the FBI Agent being blamed for shooting Todashev, and “law enforcement personnel” — plural — whom it chose not to describe at all.

Okay. If they weren't feds and they weren't staties, then...who? Were they just local cops?

In this Washington Post version, those "other law enforcement" officials stepped out of the room (why?) before the shooting began. According to the AP, these other lawmen -- the ones who stepped out -- were responsible for the original "knife lunge" report.

Three law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Todashev had lunged at the FBI agent with a knife. However, two of those officials said later in the day it was no longer clear what had happened. The third official had not received any new information.

What may we deduce from this brief passage? First, it is clear that reporters know who these other lawmen are -- even though journalists refuse to humor us with such details. Second, the Three Other Lawmen (the ones who left the room for unspecified reasons) were the ones who told journalists about the knife attack. Why did they speak of a knife? Obviously, because that's what the FBI agent(s) told them.

If the FBI agent(s) who shot Ibragim Todashev lied to local cops about why the shooting occurred -- well. That's big.

Maine stands up for privacy. This is the best news I've seen in ages. Finally, a real pro-privacy movement is starting to shape up.

On Wednesday, the state House voted 113-28 in favor of legislation that would in all but exceptional cases prohibit law enforcement agencies from tracking cellphones without a warrant. If enacted, LD 415 would make Maine the first state in the country to require authorities to obtain a search warrant before tracking cellphones or other GPS-enabled devices. The law would also require that law enforcement agencies notify a person that she was tracked within three days, unless they can prove that secrecy is necessary, in which case a delay can be granted for up to 180 days. LD 415 would additionally require the publication of an annual report online detailing the number of times location data were sought by law enforcement agencies.

Every state in the union should follow the Maine example. More than that: We need a Constitutional amendment.

Why they hate us. A couple of days ago, Naked Capitalism published an excellent piece explaining the real reasons for the continuing animus toward the United States. Are we finally mature enough to discuss these matters truthfully without fear of being called traitors or terror-enablers?

If you have a hard time thinking of cross-border drone strikes as a form of occupation, consider this, my own comment from the same post:

It’s hard to come to grips with that last point from the comfort of your chair — without putting yourself in the shoes of those who constantly watch the skies in fear of soulless, pilotless American planes. If a foreign nation sent a drone to kill someone in your neighbor’s house — in Albuquerque, say, or a Cleveland suburb — and your daughter were visiting at the time, and died … what would be the odds you’d immediately think of revenge?

I’d put those odds at just below 100%, assuming you still had a pulse and weren’t blown up yourself. After all, did not the invasion of Iraq ride a national tidal wave of revenge for piloted attacks against New York and Washington, in other words, “9/11″?

What this says is, they don’t hate us for our freedom, they hate us for our bombs, our support of their dictators, our bases, our need for their oil, our need to make the entire world comply with our desire never to lose and never to change.

Put more simply, is “terrorism” the comforting name we give to what in many cases is, in fact, the growing third-world war against worldwide empire? Is the empire creating its enemies? If so, America is indeed “at a crossroads” — but not the one Obama envisioned.

Saperstein then lays his finger on exactly why this matters, why a change of direction, if it were real and the right one, provides a point of hope:

[E]ven in this mostly great speech, [Obama] fails to come to grips with the gratuitous disaster, the self-inflicted wound, that the Iraq War has been for the US and the huge amount of damage it did to America’s standing in the Middle East. Among other things, the approval of America’s foreign policy in Turkey went from more than 70% to 10% and in Pakistan to 5%, and the war removed Iran’s natural enemy and moved Iraq close to Iran politically...

Honey. Is this true? Is it really possible that most of the honey we consume is a fake corn syrup concoction?

Much of the honey hitting supermarket shelves is derived from an ultra filtering procedure that heats honey to high temperatures, forcing the natural substance at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen. In this way, manufacturers conceal the identity of the source of the honey, which is a technique used by the Chinese, who have illegally dumped tons of their honey on the U.S. market for years. The Chinese are responsible for dumping dangerous antibiotics, artificial sweeteners, and leeching copious amounts of heavy metals into imported honey products.

• 100 percent of Winnie the Pooh sold in Walmart stores had all pollen removed.

• 100 percent of honey from individual packets from KFC and McDonald's had all pollen removed.

• 77 percent of honey from big box stores like Costco, Sam's Club, and Target had no traced of pollen.

• 100 percent of honey from drugstores like Walgreen's and CVS Pharmacy had all the pollen filtered out.

The pollen-removal signifies that you are getting artificial Chinese glop.

By using in-house private testing, some US manufacturers have found out that their Asian imported honey is watered down with high fructose corn syrup and a myriad of illegal sweeteners and antibiotics.

China. Again. Remember the great dog food contamination scandal? I'm starting to wonder if there is any actual Chinese food in Chinese food. How do you know that you have genuine Kung Pao Chicken in that white container? Maybe it's a spiced-up globule composed of rice, plastic, Neosporin and a bunch of stuff swept up from the barbershop floor...

Conspiracy theory run amuck. People wonder how I can get so pissed off at our growing "conspiracy culture," even though I believe that the JFK assassination was a coup d'etat. (Right now, this blog is running an ad for an invaluable new book about the JFK assassination. Check it out!) What ticks me off is the sheer weirdness of the claims one now finds floating through paranoia-land. For a choice example, see this YouTube offering by someone calling himself "Dallasgoldbug," who has a few strange things to say about the Underwear Bomber.

(Why are right-wing conspiracy freaks so obsessed with gold? They constantly tell us that only gold carries "real" value, even though you can't eat the stuff and you can't use it fill up your gas tank. Maybe Will Cuppy was right: "It's so shiny.")

According to Dallasgoldbug, Kurt Haskell -- the man who has offered eyewitness territory which inconvenienced the official account -- is really "a cointelpro." That's the name of an FBI project Hoover was running decades ago. Using the name of a program to describe an individual reminds me of the scene in The Campaign in which one candidate accuses another of being "an Al Qaeda." What idiocy!

I hereby proclaim the Haskell-as-spook claim to be the stupidest conspiracy theory of the week.

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A politically-incorrect non-political post

There's a lot going on in the news that I should talk about, and will...later. But right now, I need to ask a pop-cultural question. This blog usually publishes non-political posts on the weekends, but this matter can't wait.

Can someone explain to me why gays choose certain women as gay icons? Particularly women who, back in the 60s, used to appeal to straight men (or boys, as I was then)?

It has come to my attention that Julie Newmar has a considerable gay following. See, for example, here and especially here. The latter presumes that the very name of Newmar may be considered a test for gayness: If you smile fondly when she is mentioned, then you must, perforce, be the sort of man who wants to have sex with other men.

However, there is one almost fool-proof way you can determine if someone is on the gay side of the scale and it comes down to two all-important words: Julie Newmar. How someone reacts to the name Julie Newmar is incredibly revealing. Anyone with a decent percentage of gay in them loves her. For older and younger gay men alike (thanks to retro television networks) Julie Newmar has been the first gay icon for most gays since the sixties.

Say what?

Look, unlike the fellow who wrote those words, I'm old enough to remember the 60s. And I can assure you, Julie Newmar had legions of heterosexual fans back then. In fact, it would have boggled our brains to learn that homosexuals might find any reason to admire her.

For most pre-pubescent boys of my generation, our first sight of Julie Newmar in her Catwoman costume was the moment we instantly left the "girls, yuck" stage of sexual development. Suddenly, we got it. Even if the facts of life had not yet been explained to us, we got the message. Biological programming kicked in.

I'm asking about Julie Newmar because I recently caught a chunk of the 1959 film version of Lil' Abner, in which Julie plays Stupefyin' Jones. (The film also features Stella Stevens and Leslie Parrish, who were similarly astonishing.) She was indeed stupefying. I'm trying to figure out what more a woman could do (at least in 1959 terms) to appeal to a heterosexual male audience.

C'mon. Look at her. Gay visitors to this site, let me ask you: If you really are gay, then just what is it you propose to do with a woman who has that kind of body?

On a related note: A correspondent has also directed my attention to the IMDB's section on Bye Bye Birdie, a film I've never seen beyond the first few minutes. This reaction floored me:

in the 7th grade, our music teacher made us watch this. i am a guy, so i had to hate it like all the other boys. but i was pretending. oh, how i loved it...especially ann-margret! i am gay so that might explain it a little. but i bet even the straight boys dug ann-margret.

EVEN the straight boys? What the hell...?

I'd like someone to tell me when -- and how, and why -- Ann-Margret became a gay icon. We're talking about the same Ann-Margaret who played JFK's birthday a year after Marilyn Monroe did the honors. We're talking about the same Ann-Margret who was Jack Nicholson's ultimate lust object in Carnal Knowledge.

Let me explain something: When the late Ken Russell put Ann-Margret in a tight dress and had her undulate her way through a ton of chocolate sauce and baked beans, he didn't make all of that happen in order to please a bunch of gay guys. That was not his intended audience.

The "Ann-Margret as gay icon" thing seems recent. No-one thought of her that way back in the 1960s or 70s. The MST3K crew didn't make any jokes along those lines when they riffed Kitten With a Whip.

I'm not here to pick fights with the gay community. I simply want to return to the old system, when gay men fixated on the kind of women that most straight men didn't particularly want to sleep with. Rosalind Russell, for example: She was a fine actress and a very nice lady (I met her once), but even in the movies she made in her prime, she never did much for me sexually. Same goes for Barbara Streisand. Bette Davis was attractive for maybe three or four years very early on, and then she built the rest of her career on pure brio and bitchiness.

As far as I am concerned, the gay community can have those actresses.

But the ultra-curvy sex goddesses of my boyhood -- sorry, but those women were (and are) for us straight guys. They were and are the stuff of our wretched and politically incorrect fantasies.

If the gays have commandeered Julie Newmar and Ann-Margret, what's next? Do they get Marilyn Monroe? Sophia Loren? Will they go after the Bond girls? What about all of those pneumatic Hammer beauties -- Valerie Leon, Veronica Carlson, Ingrid Pitt?

Are people going to say "Oh, he must be gay" if they catch me leafing though vintage issues of Playboy?

And what will the future bring? Will Megan Fox and Sophia Vergara one day be placed in the "gays only" category? I've watched Jennifer Connelly's roller skating scene in Career Opportunities about a hundred times -- is there something gay about that?

Who makes these decisions?

Added note: It seems that Judy Garland -- once considered the ultimate female fetish object for gay men everywhere -- has lost that status in recent years. Fine by me. Frankly, I always thought that she was quite charming and lovely in those movies she made with Mickey Rooney, and I'll always love her in Meet Me in St. Louis. (There. I said it and I'm standing by it.)

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Irate Republican Syndrome

Addicting Info made a good catch: Fox News, which has screamed that the IRS psedoscandal is, like, the single worst thing ever, was screaming a very different tune a couple of years ago, when they demanded that the IRS revoke the tax-exempt status of Media Matters.

Media Matters, I think one can fairly say, does not stump for particular candidates. It's a watchdog site devoted to ferreting out the lies and distortions of...well, much of time, of Fox News. Thus, to accuse Media Matters of having a political purpose is tantamount to admitting that Fox is a political organization, not a news organization.

AI also features a story on the liberal groups which received the same "harassing" inquiries from the IRS that hit the Tea Party groups.

Progress Texas, another of the organizations, faced the same lines of questioning as the Tea Party groups from the same IRS office that issued letters to the Republican-friendly applicants. A third group, Clean Elections Texas, which supports public funding of campaigns, also received IRS inquiries.

A statement by the IRS confirmed that, “It is also important to understand that the group of centralized cases included organizations of all political views,” and that only a “minority” were selected by their names.

It is also important to point out that ever since 1913 it has been a requirement from Congress that the IRS review all organizations with tax-exempt status to see if a particular group may be abusing the status for private gain or political purposes. In 2012 there were 2,774 applications for these social welfare, tax-exempt groups as compared to 1,777 in 2011 and 1,741 in 2010. That surge in applications is rather substantial and seems to have been a red flag.

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Ginning up war

After John McCain slipped into Syria to meet with the rebels, one wit within the Syrian government tweeted a picture of John McCain as Che Guevara. Cute, ain't it?

The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, says that Iranian forces may be fighting to preserve Assad's regime in Syria. But is this claim true? FAIR took a deeper look and found that the whole structure rests on a wobbly foundation.

At EA Worldview (5/22/13), Scott Lucas took a look at the briefing that produced the story, and what the State Department official actually said was this:

It is the most visible effort we have seen of Hezbollah to engage directly in the fighting in Syria as a foreign force. We understand there are also Iranians up there. That is what the Free Syrian Army commanders are telling us. I think this is an important thing to note, the direct implication of foreigners fighting on Syrian soil now for the regime.

Suggesting that the Free Syrian Army believes Iranians are in Syria–which is probably true–is not the same thing as saying "Iran has sent soldiers to Syria" to fight on Assad's behalf. And in answering followup questions, the anonymous State Department official admits that "to be very frank, I don't have any estimates of numbers and I don't know that they are directly involved in the fighting." The source also says the Iranians "could be doing a little of both advising and fighting" and that "the reports that we're getting...are not consistent."

Frankly, these sketchy reports seem very consistent with the idea that the Syrian rebels are "telling porkies" (as the Brits used to say) in order to coax America into getting more deeply involved with their conflict. Cah-MON. How could Iran send military forces into Syria without being noticed by the NSA or the rest of our intelligence apparat?

In the meantime, Britain and France appear ready to arm "moderates" among the Syrian rebels.

The UK foreign secretary, William Hague, joined the French in arguing that supplying arms to "moderate" opposition forces would lead to less killing in Syria. Others argued the opposite; that arms supplies would only escalate the conflict.

Well, that's an awfully elastic word, "moderate" -- as we've seen, most of the American aide so far has gone to the Al Qaeda-esque Nusra Front, yet the Administration has claimed that the aid went to moderates.

Have you noticed? The far-right nutball press usually never loses an opportunity to label Obama a Muslim sympathizer. Yet to the best of my knowledge, no-one on the right has torn into this administration for aiding the Syrian rebels. Gosh. Wonder why? Could this situation have anything to do with the fact that aid to Nusra has Israel's blessing?

Ya think?

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Show some guts, IRS -- go after the Tea Party liars!

The NYT hammers home a point which I've whispered in previous posts: The real IRS scandal isn't the fact that "Tea Party" was used as a keyword. The scandal is why those groups are allowed to maintain their tax-exempt status as (quote) "social welfare organizations" (unquote), despite being flagrantly partisan.

Let us repeat a few too-seldom heard points: No right-wing group has actually lost its tax-exempt status. The only group which got kicked out of 501-c(4) land was a liberal organization in Maine. The keywords "Tea Party" and "patriot" applied to only about one-third of the groups whose tax-exempt status came under IRS review -- a distribution which strikes me as perfectly fair, since the teabaggers appeal to roughly one-third of the population.

We should thank the NYT for delving into the specifics...

When CVFC, a conservative veterans’ group in California, applied for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service, its biggest expenditure that year was several thousand dollars in radio ads backing a Republican candidate for Congress.

The Wetumpka Tea Party, from Alabama, sponsored training for a get-out-the-vote initiative dedicated to the “defeat of President Barack Obama” while the I.R.S. was weighing its application.

And the head of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, whose application languished with the I.R.S. for more than two years, sent out e-mails to members about Mitt Romney campaign events and organized members to distribute Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign literature.

Representatives of these organizations have cried foul in recent weeks about their treatment by the I.R.S., saying they were among dozens of conservative groups unfairly targeted by the agency, harassed with inappropriate questionnaires and put off for months or years as the agency delayed decisions on their applications.

But a close examination of these groups and others reveals an array of election activities that tax experts and former I.R.S. officials said would provide a legitimate basis for flagging them for closer review.

At least some of the conservative groups that are complaining about I.R.S. treatment were clearly involved in election activities on behalf of Republicans or against Democrats...

You'd think that the conservatives would prefer to play it quiet when it comes to such an obvious scam. So why did they whip up this pseudo-scandal? In part because they'll use any stick to beat Obama, and in part because they hope to protect the use of these extremely partisan "non-partisan" groups in the 2014 elections.

The stakes are high for both the I.R.S. and lawmakers in Congress, whose election fortunes next year will hinge in no small part on a flood of political spending by such advocacy groups. They are often favored by strategists and donors not for the tax benefits — they typically not do have significant income subject to tax — but because they do not have to reveal their donors, allowing them to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into elections without disclosing where the money came from.

The I.R.S. is already separately reviewing roughly 300 tax-exempt groups that may have engaged in improper campaign activity in past years, according to agency planning documents. Some election lawyers said they believed a wave of lawsuits against the I.R.S. and intensifying Congressional criticism of its handling of applications were intended in part to derail those audits, giving political nonprofit organizations a freer hand during the 2014 campaign.

No More Mister Nice Blog has published photos depicting these "non-partisan" tax-exempt folks doing their thing. I've borrowed one of those images for this post. The real scandal is that the IRS has been too gutless to go after these liars.

Time to go on the offensive. Time to shout boldly: Tea Party groups should NOT be tax-exempt. Tell the IRS to hit 'em hard!

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"Closed for repairs"

I could not catch the most recent "Real Time" when it first aired, but I've seen the New Rules segment, in which Bill Maher delivered this well-written observation about the Benghazi pseudoscandal:

In a poll this week, four in ten Republicans said Benghazi is the worst scandal in history. Second worst, Kanye West snatching the mic from Taylor Swift.

If you think Benghazi is worse than slavery, the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment, Tuskegee, purposefully injecting Guatemalan mental patients with syphilis, WMDs, and the fact that banks today are still foreclosing on mortgages that they don’t own, then your hard on for Obama has lasted for more four hours, and you need to call a doctor.

I think one should read these words in conjunction with this much-discussed interview with Bob Dole:

Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole says he doesn't believe he could make it in the modern Republican Party.

"I doubt it," he said in an interview aired on "Fox News Sunday" when asked if his generation of Republican leaders could make it in today's GOP. "Reagan couldn't have made it. Certainly, Nixon couldn't have made it, cause he had ideas. We might've made it, but I doubt it."

"They ought to put a sign on the National Committee doors that says 'Closed for repairs,' until New Year's Day next year," he said. "And spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas."

One should not be overly sympathetic to Dole; there was plenty of take-no-prisoners partisanship when he ran the Senate. I can recall the election of 1996, when he tried to use some of the crazier Whitewater theories to his advantage. At the time, he seemed willing enough to play to the nutball wing of his party, even though the grimace on his face made it painfully obvious that he didn't believe a word he was saying.

Dole also criticized Obama for not reaching out more to the Republicans in Congress. Christ, if Obama had reached any further, he'd be guilty of practicing proctology without a license.

Believe it or not, Dole used to represent the party's rightmost sector. That's why Ford chose him as a running mate.

Now, appallingly, Bob Dole is considered a liberal Republican. As this blog notes:

If Dole really does have qualms about an approach to governance he once championed, and he thinks his party has gone too far, he should just quit the party. He should quit and Jon Huntsman should quit and Christie Whitman and Colin Powell and Arnold Schwarzenegger and every other Republican who's put off by the party's excesses should quit all at once, and run a full-page ad in The New York Times explaining why. If these gray eminences, respected as they are by the mainstream press, said the party had finally gone too far for them, maybe mainstream journalists would wake the hell up and recognize that both sides aren't equally responsible for the mismanagement of our government.

Notice that none of those individuals have spewed any nonsense about Benghazi. When will they revolt against the paranoid fools who have commandeered their party?

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How things have changed

I'm a bit disappointed with Professor Peter Dale Scott, who has, in the past, written so brilliantly on the JFK assassination and on what he calls "deep politics." (That phrase usually refers to spook stuff.) He's not a "controlled demolition" conspiracy theorist, but he is unafraid to speak to that audience. I can't say I like the dubious crowd he now runs with, and I'm ticked off at his poor choice of companionship.

That said, the preface to his book The Road to 9/11 contains a profound passage, one worth quoting here. This observation nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center and everything to do with...us.

In 1961, when I came to teach at the University of California for one year, there were no tuition fees, and almost anyone who qualified could afford a university education. I remember teaching a student who after seven years in the coal mines was using his savings to put himself through law school. As late as 1970, 31 percent of the California state budget went to higher education and 4 percent to prisons. In 2005, however, these expenditure shares were on the order of 12 percent and 20 percent, respectively. In other words, the state's priorities have shifted from higher education to prisons. Or take housing. In 1961, with two years' salary as a beginning lecturer, I could have bought a house in Berkeley. Today, however, an entering lecturer might have to pay twenty years' salary to afford the same house.

The standard frog-in-boiling-water metaphor applies here. The fire making the water boil is, of course, libertarianism. Slowly, slowly, each and every year, the flames have grown and the heat has intensified, as we've inched ever closer to Ayn Rand's utopia and FDR's nightmare.

That's my problem with the conspiracy buffs that Scott, sadly, now counts among his associates. Most conspiracy fans are of the Alex Jonesian persuasion, which means that most of them are libertarians of one school or another. In other words, these people want to turn up that frog-killing fire until it reaches a solar-surface intensity. You can't voice the complaint that Scott makes here and then count among your pals the kind of people who insist on making things worse.

Speaking of Alex Jones... Rachel Maddow recently offered a few words of criticism, and AJ responded with a thug's wit:

Alex Jones responded to Rachel Maddow‘s skewering of his special tornado-weather-machine-conspiracy theory on his radio show Friday by saying she looks like a man.

After noting that the media was out to get him by hounding people he went to high school with, Jones said, “Or they could just do what Mr. Maddow does, I mean Janet Reno—Janet Napolitano! I get them all confused.” Jones pounded the desk in mock-frustration. “Pat from Saturday Night Live? No, no...Ron Maddow?”

“Nothing wrong with it, I mean, he’s a handsome guy.”

That's another thing that has changed since the 1960s. When I was a boy, a barbarian like Alex Jones would never have gained such a large audience.

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o-BOMB-a: The movie

Robert Greenwald is making a movie exposing the lies and truths about drone warfare. Here's his message:

On Thursday President Obama spoke before the American people giving a powerful and eloquent speech on the use of drones. Unfortunately the speech leaves many of the basic assumptions of a policy based on trying to kill our way to safety still in place. Help us change that.

Last year, I traveled to Pakistan and saw firsthand the damage that these drones are doing to families, businesses and the safety of our own country. Were the innocent men, women and children considered ‘a significant threat’ or did the drones malfunction? The program is still shrouded in secrecy, so all we know for sure is that countless of innocent Pakistanis are dead and the families they left behind are grieving and angry. We have some important and unique interviews but we can’t finish the film without your help.

Even if you can't afford a tiny donation, I strongly urge you to visit that website. Lot of info there -- stuff I didn't know, and I've been following this issue.

Like it or not, the time to institute checks on drone warfare is now. You won't get a better deal from the Republicans. As terrible as Obama has been, he is answerable to his base, and the base is becoming increasingly (albeit belatedly) pissed off.

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Seriously. This will be in the movie.

The new X-Men movie, Days of Future Past, is a time-travel story set (mostly) in the early 1970s. (Yes, I read the original comic version of this story back in 1981. No, I don't know how they are going to reconcile all of the previous X-Men films.) A little bird has told me that the film will open with the Kennedy assassination.

Finally, we will learn how the magic bullet worked its magic. Magneto did it.

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The Rosen quest: In (partial) defense of Eric Holder

The pattern emerges again: Obama says the right words, but his administration does the wrong thing.

The news that the Obama administration fought to be able to access Fox News reporter James Rosen's emails over a long period of time underscores just how much the DOJ latched onto the theory that Rosen was a potential criminal.

Rosen was targeted by the DOJ for his communication with State Department adviser Stephen Kim, who allegedly leaked him information about North Korea's nuclear program. The DOJ infamously labeled Rosen a "co-conspirator" for his attempts to get the information from Kim. Rosen's personal emails were searched, and the records of five different phone lines used by Fox News were also surveilled. On Thursday, it emerged that Attorney General Eric Holder had personally signed off on the Rosen warrant.

President Obama said on Thursday that he worried the investigations would chill national security and investigative journalism, and that reporters should not be prosecuted for "doing their jobs." But his Justice Department apparently did not know this.

One of the most interesting exchanges to derive from this brouhaha may be found on the Brad Blog. Brad wrote a piece which cited Glenn Greenwald's vigorous condemnation of the Obama administration cavalier attitude toward privacy. In response, a reader accused Greenwald of being close kin to Darrell Issa, the Republican Chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

This is, of course, the overheated rhetoric often employed by those who reduce all of politics to a simplistic game of shirts vs. skins, Us vs. Them. But Greenwald's response deserves to be quoted:

As for the "substance" of the commenter's accusations: what I said is 100% accurate. At the time Rosen published his article, barely anybody noticed it. It created almost no furor. Nobody suggested it was a leak that was even in the same universe as the big leaks of classified information over the last decade in terms of spilling Top Secret information into the public domain: the NYT's exposure of the Bush NSA and SWIFT programs, Dana Priest's uncovering of the CIA black site network, David Sanger's detailing of Obama's role in the Stuxnet attack on Iran, etc.

Nor has anyone claimed that this leak resulted in harm to anyone or blew anyone's cover. That's what makes it "innocuous": it's a run-of-the-mill leak that happens constantly in Washington, where government officials give classified information and intelligence reporting to DC journalists, who then print it. That happens all the time. All the time. And it has for decades.

All that's happening here is that Obama followers are doing what Bush followers constantly did to defend their leader: screaming "harm to national security!" to justify secrecy and attacks on the press. But there is no demonstrated harm to national security from this leak and nobody has remotely claimed it's anywhere near the level of leaks that prompted Bush officials threaten to prosecute journalists at the New York Times.

The effort to spy on Rosen resulted from a classic over-reaction, of the sort we've seen time and again in leak investigations. Someone in the administration saw Rosen's story, panicked at the apparent leak, and forgot one key fact: Nobody else cared.

That said, I'm not sure I can fully agree with Greenwald. Does the information Kim passed along truly deserve the "run of the mill" label?

Let's remind ourselves of the reason for spying on Rosen. He had received information about the North Korean nuclear bomb from a State Department official named Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, who was the real target of the probe. It is indeed true that such tattling is pretty common. Kim's lawyers have argued that Bob Woodward's books routinely include more important leaks.

Nevertheless, Kim has been charged under the Espionage Act.  There may be more to this story than we have been told. It seems clear that someone in the administration feared that Kim had passed along a specific piece of data which could endanger a precariously-placed agent within the North Korean power structure.

Greenwald neglects to tell his readers one important fact: Rosen reported that his information originated not from a State Department official (Kim was merely a conduit), but from "CIA sources" within the insular, despotic nation of North Korea.

Let us pause for a moment to contemplate the CIA's difficulty in cultivating sources within that country. Let us pause for another moment to contemplate what would happen to that source if he were outed. Let us pause for a third moment to contemplate how easily the North Koreans might trace a leak to its ultimate origin point based on the slimmest of clues.

If you have paused and contemplated what I've asked you to contemplate, Holder's over-reaction becomes more understandable, if not quite excusable. One thing's for sure: You cannot honestly claim that Holder went after Rosen for ideological reasons.

Nevertheless, it appears that Roger Ailes hopes to spin the matter in just that way:

“The administration’s attempt to intimidate Fox News and its employees will not succeed and their excuses will stand neither the test of law, the test of decency, nor the test of time,” Ailes wrote in the letter. “We will not allow a climate of press intimidation, unseen since the McCarthy era, to frighten any of us away from the truth.”

This rhetoric is pretty funny, coming from the guy who runs the network that promotes Ann Coulter, McCarthy's most vigorous defender and admirer.

The Watergate connection. Previously, Rosen was best known for his 2008 book The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, which I have not read. That project, which Rosen worked on for 17 years, had an interesting origin:

In the late ’80s, as an undergraduate at John Hopkins University, Mr. Rosen studied political science. During the summer breaks, he worked at the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, the branch of the National Archives that controls the Nixon papers and tapes. After graduation, Mr. Rosen received a grant from the late William F. Buckley to begin working on the biography.

Many of my readers already know about Buckley's history with the CIA. Given Buckley's involvement, you can probably guess Rosen's take on Watergate...

Instead, Mitchell is painted as a force for propriety who was framed by others—especially White House counsel John Dean, who comes off as Watergate's evil genius. (Rosen also claims Watergate burglar James McCord was secretly working for the CIA and deliberately sabotaged the break-in.)

Here's my guess: Once it became clear that the Silent Coup thesis would fly only so far, an old spookworld functionary tasked young Rosen to fly it further.

Over the decades, a lot of people on both the right and the left have voiced suspicions that McCord intentionally "bungled" the Watergate burglary. Personally, I think that his great "oopsie" came at the behest of Richard Helms. But...did Dean order the break-in? I strongly doubt it.

So far, the best riposte to Rosen's book I could find is this one:

Billed as a biography, The Strong Man reads more like a polemic. Rosen elevates Mitchell's standing at the bar (his bond practice, this book unpersuasively insists, put him "among the nation's most elite lawyers"). The author exaggerates the good that Mitchell did as attorney general ("to ensure racial progress he did more than any executive branch official of the twentieth century," Rosen claims -- overlooking, among others, Burke Marshall, the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights chief who led the effort to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act). Rosen does this to boost the credibility of his restoration project, but his hype accomplishes the opposite.

In the annals of Watergate, the slush-fund story was the beginning of the end. In a 2005 Vanity Fair article, Bernstein recalled that when he learned that Mitchell was one of the keepers of the secret fund used to pay the Watergate burglars, he turned to Bob Woodward and said: "Oh my God, this president is going to be impeached." In her memoir, Personal History, Katharine Graham said she was "shocked" that the attorney general's response was "so personal and offensive." But Rosen contends that Mitchell's distress was genuine and justified because the Post story was "dead wrong." Mitchell "never knew about, let alone 'controlled,' any secret fund used to finance 'intelligence operations' against the Democrats," he writes.

Perhaps Rosen has his own definitions of "control," "secret" and "intelligence operations." Otherwise, his revisionism, at this point, has crossed over to an alternate universe. A month after the Post story, Mitchell's successor as head of CREEP, Clark MacGregor, admitted there was a cash fund from which five men, including Mitchell, were authorized to get money. In his acclaimed book Nightmare, J. Anthony Lukas reported that Mitchell approved the use of $250,000 for gathering "intelligence" on the Democratic Party. Rosen acknowledges that most historians share Lukas's line. He takes another.

Richard Nixon once said to David Frost: “If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there’d have been no Watergate.” Martha was John's wife, and she was pretty famous in her own right. If you want a few clues as to why Nixon would utter such words, start here.

Did James Rosen (or whoever set him on his 17-year literary adventure) have an ax to grind? Or was he just ambitious? As Arthur Sullivan might have put it:

He polished that bio so carefully
That now he is a talking head on Fox teevee...

When the Rosen affair first became public, my initial reaction was that the Fox Newsers seem to have established their own spy network within spy-dom. Now that I've learned more about Rosen, I don't feel inclined to rescind that gut reaction.

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Obama's drone speech

Well, at least Obama has addressed the drone issue. At least he's now willing to talk about one of the most infuriating aspects of his presidency. At least he seems willing to chart a new course.

But as I look at the reaction to the President's latest Big Speech, one question keeps resounding in my head: Don't these people know about the dichotomy between Obama's words and deeds? After all, this is the guy who, back in 2008, said that he was going to renegotiate NAFTA. Without that promise, he wouldn't have won a couple of key primaries -- in fact, he probably would not be President. Did he keep his word? No, he did not.

Maybe Obama is sincere about winding down his administration's reliance on the "death from above" approach. Maybe he has changed his tune because he knows damned well that Al Qaeda is a ghost of its former self.

Here's the NYT's take on the drone speech:

The targeting of citizens of other countries will now be subjected to the same conditions the administration uses to kill American citizens abroad. They must be shown to pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans,” as Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. wrote in a letter to Congress that was made public on Wednesday. In addition, the letter said, lethal force can be used only when capture is not feasible and there are “no other reasonable alternatives to effectively address the threat.”

Much of the problem comes down to the concept of imminence. It's hard to demonstrate conclusively that Awlaki -- even if we take the official "Theory of Awlaki" at face value (which I do not) -- was much more than a propagandist and a rabble-rouser. Even if we concede that the man was evil, how did he qualify as an imminent threat? 

This letter from AG Holder tries to make the "imminence" argument against Awlaki. Frankly, I don't find his words very persuasive. Nevertheless, the document is important. In it, Holder helpfully names the other three Americans killed by drone strikes:

The United States is further aware of three other U.S. citizens who have been killed in such U.S. counterterrorism operations over that same time period: Samir Kahn, 'Abd al-Rahman Anwar al-Aulaqi, and Jude Kenan Mohammed. These individuals were not specifically targeted by the United States.

So the fact that those guys were collateral damage makes the extra-judicial killing of Americans acceptable?

Samir Kahn was the editor of Inspire, the jihadist magazine; he was born in New York and his family lives in North Carolina.

The second name is that of Awlaki's son. We are now told that his death was an accident. Previous news reports conveyed the impression that he had been targeted.

The third man hailed from North Carolina and entered into the world of extreme Islam via an unusual route...

When Jude Kenan Mohammad was about 18 and living in Raleigh, N.C., according to people who knew him, he came under the influence of an older man, Daniel Patrick Boyd, who taught him a violent, radical version of Islam.

Mr. Boyd would be charged in 2009 and eventually imprisoned as the ringleader of a group of North Carolina residents who had vowed to carry out a violent jihad both in the United States and overseas. Mr. Mohammad was also charged, but by then, partly at the direction of Mr. Boyd, he had traveled to Pakistan, where he had joined a group of militants in that country’s tribal area.

On Wednesday, the United States government officially acknowledged for the first time what had long been rumored among his friends in Raleigh: that Mr. Mohammad was killed in a C.I.A. drone strike on a compound in South Waziristan, Pakistan, on Nov. 16, 2011. He was 23.

If "Daniel Patrick Boyd" strikes you as an unusual name for an Islamic terror teacher, well, you're not the first person to think that way. His father was a captain in the Marines and he grew up in Alexandria, VA. As a young man, he traveled to Afghanistan to join the mujahideen's war against the Soviets.

His later terror cell in North Carolina has become a lint trap for spooky speculation. Wayne Madsen (whom I do not trust, though he is sometimes right) says that the group received aid from the CIA.

If you have a few grains of salt handy, feel free to check out Mr. Madsen's take on the NC ring. I would feel a lot more comfortable with his allegations if I could find non-Madsen sourcing for them; alas, the best I've been able to come up with is this profile published in the San Diego Union Tribune:

Authorities believe Boyd's roots in terrorism run deep. When he was in Pakistan and Afghanistan from 1989 through 1992, he had military-style training in terrorist camps and fought the Soviets, who were ending their occupation of Afghanistan, according to the indictment.

He must have come to the Agency's attention at that time.

In 1991, Boyd and his brother were convicted of bank robbery in Pakistan. They were also accused of carrying identification showing they belonged to the radical Afghan guerrilla group, Hezb-e-Islami, or Party of Islam. Each was sentenced to have a foot and a hand cut off for the robbery, but the decision was later overturned.

A former CIA official who was stationed in Pakistan at the time said the agency intervened and quickly persuaded the Pakistani intelligence service to help free the Boyd brothers. The former official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the incident.

Looks like we have the basis of a quid pro quo arrangement, wouldn't you say? 

It is unclear when Boyd and his family returned to the United States, but in March 2006, Boyd traveled to Gaza and attempted to introduce his son to individuals who also believed that violent jihad was a personal religious obligation, the indictment said. The document did not say which son Boyd took to Gaza.

The indictment said some of the defendants took trips to Jordan, Israel and Pakistan to engage in jihad, but only discussed the results of one of those trips. After traveling to Israel, Boyd and his two sons returned to the United States in July 2007 "having failed in their attempt," according to the documents.

It's quite possible that Mr. Boyd -- who owed a longstanding debt to the CIA -- might have been sent to that part of the world with a directive to scope out and scoop up potential troublemakers. At this same period in his life, he was operating a small Middle Eastern grocery store in North Carolina. Since he cannot have earned much from that endeavor, one wonders where he got the money for his travels.

Boyd is in prison now for inciting people to commit acts of terror. Or so we are told. If nothing else, he, Samir Kahn and Jude Kenan Mohammed help to cement the impression that Al Qaeda is a strangely American phenomenon. For more on that, see the post directly preceding this one.

(As before, please pay strict attention to our second rule for Cannonfire comments.)

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Terrorism and Pilate's question

Will the last REAL jihadi in Al Qaeda please turn out the lights?

We've learned that the great AP leak-finding effort concerned a Saudi pseudo-terrorist who infiltrated Al Qaeda in Yemen. This guy was supposed to wear an underwear bomb aboard a jet. Obviously, he did no such thing.

In the previous post, I argued that the first undie-bomber may also have been a fake.

A couple of days ago, Marcy Wheeler voiced her own suspicions about Fahd al-Quso, recently killed by a drone strike in Yemen. He allegedly masterminded undiebomber #2 (the infiltrator), and he also played a role in the first crotch-bomb effort. Al-Quso was a very odd duck. He got his start as a jihadi when he was assigned to videotape the attack on the USS Cole -- a simple enough gig, you'd think, yet he managed to screw it up by falling asleep on the job.

Funny thing: The US went out of its way not to mention Fahd until quite recently.

Whatever Quso’s role in UndieBomb 1.0, the implication of the timing is clear: he was central to the UndieBomb 2.0 plot. Indeed, it is almost certain that CIA asked AP to delay publishing their story to give time to kill Quso, who had just sent our mole off with another UndieBomb.

In other words, one plausible explanation for why DOJ did not confirm what other reports made clear is that it did not want to tip Quso off to what Abdulmutallab told them about him. That is, if they were already planning the op against him, they wouldn’t want him to know they knew how Abdulmutallab had found him 2.5 years earlier.

That is just one possibility, of course.

But if that’s the case — if DOJ obscured Quso’s role in the government’s most extensive accusations that Anwar al-Awlaki had an operational role in targeting the US — then are the claims about Awlaki true?

Marcy's thoughts aroused this interesting comment:

maybe undiebombs of all versions were CIA stings? and Fahd al-Quso was the CIA’s guy in the stings? and now that the stings were done...so is al-Quso?

In the past, I've argued that the drone killing of al-Awlaki himself was of questionable veracity, because the government of Yemen pointedly refused to verify the man's death. They never identified a body. A couple of cars sped away from the scene, and Awlaki (an American citizen) may have been in one of those vehicles.

In her most recent post, Marcy notes that -- contrary to Eric Holder's recent claim -- would-be crotch bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab may never have been in contact with Awlaki.

But even there, he doesn’t attribute Awlaki’s influence to conversations he had with Awlaki in Yemen — even Awlaki acknowledged to having contact with Abdulmutallab, though he maintained he did not order the attack. Rather, Abdulmutallab points to speeches Awlaki published, speeches which, according to other court documents, he listened to as early as 2005.

Awlaki went completely unmentioned in two earlier confessions made by Abdulmutallab.

I've argued -- and I'm not the only one -- that Awlaki himself was an infiltrator, and that his drone killing was staged. See here and here. I suspect that he may now be living under a new identity in a new country.

Why else would the U.S. later announce that his 16 year old son was also killed by a drone? There was no sensible reason to go after a mere boy.

Perhaps some drone attacks are not quite real. It's not as though any reporters are likely to go into the inhospitable wilds of Yemen to double-check whether these killings actually happened as described.

Let's review our top ten reasons for suspecting that Awlaki was something other than what we've been told:

1. He was born in New Mexico, even though he claimed to be a native-born Yemeni when he applied for an American Social Security card. (If you can figure that one out, please share with the rest of the class!)

2. He went to George Washington University, a school with strong CIA ties. (Any foreign national going to that school is a likely target for an Agency recruitment effort.)

3. Despite having undeniable ties to three of the 9/11 hijackers, the Pentagon invited him to speak at a formal luncheon. This was after the attack on the World Trade Center.

4. He was allowed to fly in and out of the country with impunity. Whenever he was outside the country, the FBI would issue statements to this effect: "Gosh, we'd really like to interview the guy, but he's beyond our reach." Yet whenever he was within our borders, he was left alone.

5. His death has been announced more than once.

6. A Murdoch-owned newspaper in Australia once as much as admitted that Awlaki cooperated with Yemeni authorities in an effort to round up Al Qaeda members in Yemen.

7. In 1994, Awlaki set up secure communications for Bin Laden using military phone lines.

8. During Awlaki's time in this country, the authorities routinely turned a blind eye to his legal problems. He was twice busted for soliciting prostitutes, yet nothing came of either incident. The man had a guardian angel.

9. He was not officially tied to the 9/11 attacks until 2008, even though he had helped the hijackers rent an apartment.

10. For the most part, nobody censored or impeded his YouTube calls for Jihad.

I could go on, but those ten points will suffice for now.

One could point to other claimed Al Qaeda double agents. The most famous example would be that bizarre Green Beret and Islamic fanatic, Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed. For years, people have wondered whether he was a jihadi who infiltrated our military or one of "ours" who infiltrated the Bin Laden organization. To my eyes, the latter scenario seems much more likely -- especially if we keep in mind that he offered his services to the CIA as early as 1984.

The esteemed professor and former ambassador Peter Dale Scott has discussed this remarkable case:

Ali Mohamed. …. trained most of al Qaeda’s top leadership – including Bin Laden and Zawahiri – and most of al Qaeda’s top trainers. He gave some training to persons who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing…. From 1994 until his arrest in 1998, he lived as an American citizen in California, applying for jobs as an FBI translator.11

Patrick Fitzgerald knew Ali Mohamed well. In 1994 he had named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the New York landmarks case, yet allowed him to remain free. This was because, as Fitzgerald knew, Ali Mohamed was an FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989.12 Thus, from 1994 “until his arrest in 1998 [by which time the 9/11 plot was well under way], Mohamed shuttled between California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least a dozen other countries.”

As I say in our book, in 1993 Ali Mohamed had been detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada, when he inquired at an airport after an incoming al Qaeda terrorist who turned out to be carrying two forged Saudi passports. Mohamed immediately told the RCMP to make a phone call to the United States, and the call secured his release.15 We’ve since been told that it was Mohamed’s West coast FBI handler, John Zent, “who vouched for Ali and got him released.”16

This release enabled Ali to go on to Kenya, take pictures of the U.S. Embassy, and deliver them to bin Laden for the Embassy bombing plot.

If all these latest revelations about Ali Mohamed are true, then:

1) a key planner of the 9/11 plot, and trainer in hijacking, was simultaneously an informant for the FBI.

2) This operative trained the members for all of the chief Islamist attacks inside the United States – the first WTC bombing, the New York landmarks plot, and finally 9/11, as well as the attacks against Americans in Somalia and Kenya.

3) And yet for four years Mohamed was allowed to move in and out of the country as an unindicted conspirator. Then, unlike his trainees, he was allowed to plea-bargain. To this day he may still not have been sentenced for any crime.

Here's the most recent info that Wikipedia has on the guy:

Further news sources in 2001 seem to suggest that Ali Mohamed is providing information on al-Qaeda in an attempt to reduce his sentence,[10] and that his sentencing "has been postponed indefinitely.".[19] In 2006, Mohamed's wife, Linda Sanchez, was reported in 2006 as saying, "He's still not sentenced yet, and without him being sentenced I really can't say much. He can't talk to anybody. Nobody can get to him. They have Ali pretty secretive...it's like he just kinda vanished into thin air."

And that, my friends, is it. No further details.

I think you get the picture. Would you be even slightly surprised to learn that Ali Mohamed is now a free man operating under a new identity?

One might also mention the bizarre case of Adam Gadahn, the Jewish kid from Orange county who became a key Bin Laden aide. Allegedly, he still holds a senior position in Al Qaeda. Wikipedia describes him as

...an American who is a senior operative, cultural interpreter, spokesman[2] and media advisor[3] for the Islamist group Al-Qaeda. Since 2004, he appeared in a number of videos produced by Al-Qaeda as "Azzam the American" ('Azzām al-Amrīki, عزام الأمريكي, sometimes transcribed as Ezzam Al-Amerikee).

Notice that Obama hasn't droned this guy to death, even though Gadahn has been indicted for treason.

Gadahn was thought to have been captured in Pakistan in 2010. Later, we learned that the guy they captured was actually Abu Yahya Mujahdeen Al-Adam, yet another lily-white American boy turned Al Qaeda jihadist.

Even though Al-Adam is reputedly a Philadelphia native, and even though you'd think that our media might consider him a newsworthy fellow, information on the man remains hard to come by. This site made a brave attempt to dig up further info:

According to Dawn, Al-Adam is a "close friend" of Osama bin Laden, which seems rather doubtful to me, but not impossible. It depends on the age of the man in question. Here's a little idle speculation to fill your time as we await more specific and verifiable information.

There was a jihadist during the late 1990s named Adam Mohammed Noor, who was an associate of Wadih El-Hage, an American who was actually a close associate of Bin Laden. There was also an American "Adam" who was a close friend of Ali Mohamed, another American who kept close company with Bin Laden. It's not clear if these two Adams were the same person.

I'm starting to wonder: Did Osama Bin Laden have any non-American associates?

Holder has specified that, aside from Awlaki, drones have killed three other Americans. No names; no identification. Yes, I'm indulging in wild speculation here, but I gotta ask: Could these three guys be the "American contingent" (Gadahn, EL-Hage, Al Adam) surrounding Bin Laden? And is it not possible that "drone strikes" were actually covers for operations designed to exfiltrate American penetration agents?

A 2004 story in The Times revealed that an Al Qaeda cleric named Abu Qatada was actually a double agent working for MI5.

According to the BBC, Mossad concocted an entire Al Qaeda cell in Gaza. Completely fake.

Al Qaeda is starting to remind me of the American Communist Party in the 1950s. Back then, by some estimates, FBI infiltrators amounted to half the membership. Some wags have even suggested the dues paid by the Bureau's spies kept many CP chapters afloat. Similar claims have been made about Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s and 1970s.

Say what you will about Pontius Pilate -- at least the old bastard asked the right question.

(Note: Please look at the Rules for Comments at the top of the left-hand column. I'll be strictly enforcing Rule #2.)

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Finally, a solution to the Great Crotch-Bomber Mystery

Walter Pincus delivers the other side of the story. He tells us why the Obama administration made such an enormous effort to spy on AP in order to track a leaker.

Previously, it had been established the AP had gotten wind of a plot to bomb an airliner on the anniversary of Bin Laden's death. At the government's request, the news organization kept mum about the story until given the go-ahead to publish.

Now we have the key details. Turns out that this bomb plot was actually a sting operation, of sorts. The target was AQAP -- Al Qaida on the Arab Peninsula, the Yemeni terror group:

One goal was to get AQAP’s operational head, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso. That happened one day before the AP story appeared.

A second goal was to find and possibly kill AQAP bombmaker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, whose first underwear device almost killed Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s anti-terrorism chief. Soon after, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab used such a device in a failed Christmas Day bombing attempt as his Northwest Airlines flight was landing in Detroit.

Hitting targets in the United States is one of AQAP’s goals. In association with Saudi intelligence, the CIA inserted a Saudi who convinced AQAP that he wanted to be a suicide bomber. Eventually he was outfitted with Asiri’s newest device, which he was to use on a U.S. aircraft. After the device was delivered to U.S. officials, someone or several people leaked the information to the AP.

White House press secretary Jim Carney had announced that there were no Al Qaida plots to observe the anniversary. AP considered this statement a lie, although technically, there was truth in it.

 This was a CIA ruse, not a terrorist-initiated plot.

Marcy Wheeler derides the suggestion that the Saudi double agent could have returned to AQAP and resumed his spying chores. The key words in Pincus' story: "After the device was delivered to U.S. officials..." If the bomb plot was foiled -- if the bomb was safely in US hands -- then how (Marcy asks) could the Saudi spook get back into Al Qaida's good graces?

As I pondered that poser, mulling over all the potential scenarios, a lightbulb flashed overhead.

Pincus, are you thinking what I'm thinking...?

Probably not. And even if the idea that just now occurred to me has also occurred to him, no reporter in his august position would allow himself voice such a novel theory in public. Of course, we bloggers are snarling dogs who snap all tethers. Giving voice to novel theories is what we do. My little brainstorm can be summed up in a single sentence:

What if "crotch-bomber" Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab was also a double agent?

What if his arrest, trial and conviction were all ruses? What if he now has a new life under a new name?

That scenario explains many of the lingering oddities that have always surrounded the underwear bombing incident of Christmas, 2009. We've discussed these mysteries in a series of previous posts: See here and here and here.

Think back, my friends, to the final days of 2009 and the early days of 2010. Think back to the story that had everyone in the world filled with angst and speculation. Suddenly, we can see everything about that incident in a brand new light...

1. Why did a mystery videographer document the entire flight? Why didn't this cameraman show his (no doubt quite dramatic) footage to the media? Why didn't the FBI try to track him down? It makes no sense to suggest that the videographer was a fellow terrorist, because if the explosion had gone off as planned, the footage would have been destroyed along with the aircraft.

Maybe...maybe the videographer worked for the CIA or a friendly agency. Maybe Captain Video knew that the bomb would never go off.

2. Who was the well-dressed accomplice who helped Mutallab board the flight? Reliable witnesses Kurt and Lori Haskell said that the accomplice helped the crotch-bomber board the flight without a passport.

Maybe...maybe the Well-Dressed Man was one of Mutallab's handlers.

3. Why the multiple stories about passports? As noted above, Mutallab needed help to board the flight because he did not have a passport; reliable witnesses are very clear on this point. But when writers commented on that oddity, a passport suddenly showed up. We never got a clear explanation as to how a man could both have and not have a passport.

Maybe...maybe that passport was a last-minute part of Mutallab's "legend."

4. Why did the Nigerians help Mutallab move in and out of that country? If I recall correctly, this aspect of the story was reported only in African newspapers.

Maybe...maybe the CIA recruited the help of the Nigerian authorities.

5. How did Mutallab escape the "no fly" list? His father, a prominent Nigerian banker, had warned the American embassy that his son had turned into a radical extremist capable of violence. Fox News was told that the CIA had tracked Mutallab for months beforehand. The UK had barred the young extremist from entering the country.

Maybe...maybe the father knew that his son was an Al Qaida infiltrator. Maybe the embassy warning was designed to establish cover. And maybe the no-fly list was massaged to allow a double-agent to board.

6. Why didn't the PETN crotch bomb go off after it was set on fire? I never could understand why American officials took such a shoulder-shrugging "no worries" attitude toward the actual mechanism allegedly placed inside that young man's goody bag. As you may recall, a parade of experts assured us that such a device was always hopeless and harmless: "PETN? Bah. Nothing to worry about. I eat PETN for breakfast. Hell, I've been known to slather it on toast..."

Maybe...maybe there was no bomb. Maybe no PETN was ever aboard that aircraft. Maybe this whole exercise in theater was designed to leave AQAP with the impression that Mutallab had honestly tried, and failed, to carry out a suicide mission.

7. Why did Mutallab have a beatific, tranced-out look on his face after lighting his crotch on fire? You'd think that even the most fervent jihadi would have some sort of reaction. No matter how zealous a young fanatic might be, fire and testicles simply don't mix.

Maybe...maybe the whole thing was a magic trick, a bit of theater. How difficult would it be to rig up fire-resistant underwear, covered with flammable material?

8. How did Mutallab get the money for his travels? Although his father is well-off, we have been told that he and dad did not always get along. The father has multiple wives, and young Farouk, as the family called him, was born to one of the less-favored wives. More importantly, Dad had ratted out his own son to the Americans months earlier.

Maybe...maybe we should always remember that a mysterious source of funding is the first indicator of spookiness.

9. Why did witnesses placed Mutallab at his father's retirement party in Lagos just a few days before the flight? The father told journalists that he hadn't seen his son for months.

Maybe...maybe father and son had one last get-together before young Mutallab went off on his assignment. Maybe they both knew that the young man would then have a new life under a new identity.

If Mutallab was a penetration agent, he no doubt relayed tons of useful information about a shadowy group hiding in the lawless regions of Yemen. Now that the second undie-bomber has been revealed as an agent, whoever is now running AQAP (presuming that the organization still exists) must be asking the same questions I have asked about Mutallab.

Are you about to tell me that my theory is too far-fetched, too James Bond-y to have any credibility? Re-read what Walter Pincus has to say about the Saudi who got into the good graces of AQAP. That scenario also reads like something out of a spy novel.

Added note: I sent Marcy Wheeler a message directing her attention to this post. My final words: "This is your cue to make me look like an idiot by telling me where my theory goes wrong."

Rising to that challenge, she reminded me that Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab appealed his conviction. Well. That tidbit certainly calls my theory into question, although perhaps a kind reader can effect a rescue. Oddly enough, Farouk asked none other than Kurt Haskell to function as his witness.

He said he and his wife were on the flight returning from an African safari. While sitting at the airport, he said he saw Abdulmutallab being escorted through security by a man in a tan suit who spoke perfect English.

The airline gate worker initially refused to let Abdulmutallab to board until the man in the tan suit intervened.

He said passengers were kept on the plane after it landed in Detroit without any concern about the explosives on the plane. He said passengers were taken into the terminal without anyone checking their bags or for possible accomplices.

It soon became obvious that the FBI wasn’t concerned about anything he had to say, including the man in the tan suit.

He said Abdulmutallab was allowed to board the plane without a passport and going through security. He said he’s disappointed that the U.S. government allowed Abdulmutallab to get onto the plane.

“Regardless of how media and government try to shape this case, I am convinced that Umar was given an intentionally defective bomb by a U.S. agent... to stage a false terrorist attack to be used to implement various government policies. It really saddens me that the government won’t admit its role in the event. Because of this case, I will never trust anything the government says, ever.”

Then, Haskell turned to Abdulmutallab.

“Umar, you are not a Muslim martyr. You are merely a government patsy.”

Intentionally given a defective bomb? Okay. I guess that's possible. But how? And who?

This April, he was transferred (for unknown reasons) to the Supermax facility in Colorado -- the most secure facility in the country.

By the way: Most of the earlier news stories used the spelling "Abdul Mutallab," or just "Mutallab," which I have retained. The more recent stories invariably spell the name "Abdulmutallab." Arabic names are notoriously difficult to render in English. Also, although Haskell called him "Umar," I distinctly recall a news story in an African periodical which said that the family always referred to him as "Farouk."

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Listening to your telephone calls

Back on May 5, we looked at some disturbing comments made by former FBI counterterrorism agent Tom Clemente regarding the Boston bombing investigation. In essence, Clemente said that it would be possible to retrieve a stored phone conversation involving one of the bombers:

"...Welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

Does this mean what it seems to mean -- that the NSA records and stores all of our telephone conversations? The comments here give some insight into the matter, especially these words from someone calling himself "Dilbert"...

...I know Tim personally and I believe he knows exactly what he's talking about. He shared these same views with me roughly 10-12 years ago. This is likely an extension of the old Echelon program. I doubt they're storing audio; more likely using voice-recognition and dumping this all to text. Sure, they could be doing the old keyword flags but I doubt that (too much noise). I expect it's all dumped into massive databases for after-the-fact investigation.

For more on the capabilities, just do a search on "echelon semantic forests"

On the other hand, a comment from one "Alex" points out the technical barriers -- the need for high compression, the ability to store everything, and the simple fact that "speech to text sucks."

A certain BT adds:

It is in the National Security State's best interests to imply that it can do more than what it actually admits doing even if it can't really do what it wants to imply, and I wouldn't put it past certain TLA's to feed deliberate misinformation to a former employee in order to make sure it gets into the press.

You must come to your own conclusions about the credibility of this offering, from someone calling himself Stratego:

I don't know if the NSA is monitoring every phone call. I know how they work and find it difficult to believe that they are monitoring everything. It's the US Government after all. However, I certainly know for a FACT that they are illegally monitoring US person's calls, and dragging in loads of US citizen and US person data, public and private.

NSA has had tons of problems over the last few years simply with data center power. They can't get enough power from the local utilities, hence Bluffdale, UT and a temporary Austin, TX location.

How much would it cost to store all of the audio from all of those calls? Perhaps less than you think...

I'll assume that speech-to-text is not good enough, or that we want to keep the audio around for some other reason.

Assume the NSA is using something like Codec2 at 1400 bits/sec ( 175 bytes/sec). That's 10.25 KB/min/person.

Extrapolating this to the entire country (310 million people), we get about 3 terabytes per minute, or about one large hard drive.

Amazon S3 glacier storage is about $0.01/GB/month, so storing one month of recordings would round up to $31/month. At 500 minutes of talking for each person (average) per month, that gives us $15,500/month ($186,000/year) to record the entire country.

Wow. You'd expect the cost of such a project to be in the millions.

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Another one

The post below discusses the scandal of government eavesdropping on AP, which had gotten wind of a terror plot that may have been a sting operation. Now we learn that the Justice Department also snooped on -- God help us -- a Fox News reporter named James Rosen. In this instance, the Justice Department was investigating leaks related to a report on North Korea in 2009.

They got hold of Rosen's telephone records, they scooped up his emails, and they scrutinized his interactions with a State Department official accused of leaking the report.

Let's zoom out for a wider picture. The information on North Korea came from a CIA source. Some reports coming out of the Benghazi pseudo-scandal have led me to believe that sources within the intelligence community feed scoops to Fox and its friends. In fact, even before Benghazi, I suspected that the right had established its own spy network within spy-dom.

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Scandals, real and fake

Apologies for the irregular posting; my life has been a tad hectic. Frankly, I have felt hesitant to discuss the alleged "Obama scandals," since the two issues that conservatives seem so desperate to talk about -- Benghazi and the alleged IRS targeting of Tea Party groups -- are obviously bunkie-doodoo. (Please forgive the use of technical terminology.)

Yet I'm also disinclined to leap to Obama's defense. Why? Because I still don't like the guy -- for other reasons. Drones are a genuine scandal, yet both the right-wing and mainstream media infrastructures would prefer to keep this issue under-discussed.

Fortunately, all the hype about the two great pseudo-scandals has not had any impact on Obama's poll numbers. In fact, Republican insistence on beating dead horses may have made Obama more popular.

Something similar occurred when Clinton's grand jury testimony in the Monica Lewinsky probe was aired: Although everyone presumed that Clinton's approval numbers would plummet, he actually gained public sympathy. And yes, that testimony included the famous "meaning of is" remark, which seemed reasonable in context.

In case you missed it, a few days ago, Brad Friedman published the internet's best take-down of the IG report on the IRS affair.

Again: Context is all. In context, it seems quite reasonable to use "Tea Party" and similar trigger words to determine whether a political pressure group is masquerading as a tax-exempt social welfare organization. To see what I mean by "context," simply glance at the chart to your left, which proves that the keywords "Tea Party, ""Patriots" and "9/12" figured in only one-third of cases under review. Since polls indicate that these groups appeal to roughly one-third of the electorate, I see nothing wrong with this distribution.

No right-wing group has actually lost its tax-exempt status, although many ought to. In fact, under Obama, the only organization to get into truly serious trouble with Mr. Taxman was, perhaps predictably, a left-wing association in Maine.

The only real scandal here is that the Tea Partiers are being allowed to cheat on their taxes. Must we continue to pretend that these are non-partisan "social welfare" groups?

The Benghazi "controversy" comes down to one word: Horseshit. That's all it ever was.

Once more into the breach dear friends...

All evidence indicates that that video incited a spontaneous demonstration in the city of Benghazi, as occurred elsewhere in the Muslim world. (It now seems likely that that video was created by pro-Romney forces as a provocation designed to incite precisely the sort of havoc it wreaked. We've discussed this scenario in previous posts.) Militants opportunistically used this larger protest as cover for an attack on the consulate -- like red fish swimming in a school of gray fish.

When tasked to untangle so confusing a series of events in so remote a locale, American intelligence needed a few days to figure out who did what and for which reason. One must appreciate the difficulty of gathering information in this case. Electronic eavesdropping can't have offered much help. The protesters probably did not include many people who wanted to step forward and give after-action interviews to the CIA.

One faction of the intelligence community initially believed that the consulate attack occurred when the local protesters got out of control. I presume that this idea came from an on-the-ground source in Libya. But from the beginning, other observers felt that the weaponry used to destroy the consulate was too sophisticated to be the work of an enraged mob of ordinary townsfolk.

And now here we are, months later. The right still keeps trying to transform a temporary period of conflicting intel into a Watergate-style cover-up. What nonsense!

The only good thing to come out of the whole affair is the revelation that ABC News has a "Fox-y" mole among its personnel. For more on that, see here.

Alas, the AP scandal is anything but nonsensical. The extremely important interview with AP President Gary Pruitt (embedded above) clarifies both the facts and their significance.

The origin point for this scandal involves an AP story that the United States had foiled a plot by Al Qaeda sympathizers to mark the anniversary of Bin Laden's death by blowing up an airliner. The AP learned of this story but kept mum at the request of the administration.

At the same time, the White House was telling the press that there was no evidence of a terror plot to coincide with that date. That statement, it seems, was false.

Why the lie? Marcy Wheeler, as always, offers some ideas. What if the AP learned of an "Al Qaeda plot" that was -- at least to some degree -- born in the USA?

And conflicting claims about threats must be what the AP told the White House was newsworthy, because — even though it played a fairly minor part of the original AP story — it is what John Brennan emphasized when explaining why he had to have a conference call that would lead to Richard Clarke figuring out the plot was actually a sting.

I said there was never a threat to the American public as we had said so publicly, because we had inside control of the plot and the device was never a threat to the American public.

[snip]

I — I — what I’m saying is that we were explaining to the American public why that IED was not in fact a threat at the time that it was in the control of individuals. When — when we say positive control, inside control, that means that we (inaudible) that operation either environmentally or any number of ways. It did not in any way reveal any type of classified information. And I told those individuals and there are, you know, transcripts that are available of that conversation, “I cannot talk to you about the operational details of this whatsoever.”

I’m still not entirely [sure] why this was so sensitive to the White House. As I’ve noted, there were several possible ways for Brennan to explain the discrepancy away that wouldn’t have outed their insider.

Provisionally, it looks to me as though we are dealing with the international version of those semi-ersatz FBI terror "stings" which exist purely to make the FBI look effective. I would go so far as to suggest that the Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab underwear bomber case may have been one such episode. Many of the mysteries surrounding that incident remain largely unexplained.

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This shit's gotta stop

If mine is a one-man crusade, so be it. But someone has to stand up against Fraudism -- against the debauchery running rampant in the art world.

A mediocre painting of Bea Arthur naked sold $1.9 million at a Christie's auction. The artist is a hack named John Currin.

The painting has no value as a painting. The hair is terrible. She looks like she's wearing a helmet, and there's no shade on the shadow side. The eyes are flat, two-dimensional; they don't look like spheres resting in a socket. Where are the highlights? The skin seems chalky, lacking in vitality.

Remember when you mom told you "Don't criticize unless you can do better yourself?" Well, I can. I could paint better than that before I took art classes. I'm not saying that I'm particularly gifted; I'm saying that Currin isn't. The best that can be said for him is that he's more professional than George W. Bush, although Dubya is catching up quick.

Why did a bad painting fetch such a high price? Frankly, this work is a gimmick -- a one-liner, a laugh-inducer. Some well-heeled fool paid nearly two million bucks for the novelty value, not for the talent on display.

The art world could not be more foppish, decadent and disgusting. The garbage values which rule that world impoverish all of us. Imagine how lush and gorgeous our world would be if our society rewarded painters who can paint. We could be living in a new Renaissance if we encouraged young artists to develop skills instead of gimmicks. As matters stand, neither our art schools nor our critical infrastructure place any value on talent, dexterity, brushwork, composition, color theory or anything else that used to matter to painters.

Nowadays, painting is discussed purely in terms of rhetoric. Insultingly, art history professors talk about how to "read" a painting.

This shit's gotta stop. Let me repeat:

ART IS NOT ABOUT IDEAS. ART IS NOT WHAT BUT HOW.

If you talk about painting in terms of subject matter, you advertise your idiocy. A Cezanne still life is not more or less valuable because he painted grapes instead of radishes. An atheist can still find Michelangelo's tondo of the Holy Family breathtaking.

If you have an idea to express, do not paint, do not draw, do not sculpt. Do what I do every day: Write an essay.

Ideas are for literature.

ART = SKILL.

Nothing else. Skill is not part of art; skill is art. I put that equal sign in there for a reason.

If you are about to interject: "Well, I agree that skill should be part of the equation, but..." NO. FUCK YOU. I know where you're going, and I refuse to follow. You are the enemy. You must be destroyed.

In order to establish the new Renaissance of which I speak, we must chop down the tree of decadent values. It's not enough to reduce that tree to a stump; we need to uproot it completely.

In other words, I have no problem if a nude picture of Bea Arthur fetches nearly two million dollars -- but the painting must be done superbly.

By the way: If you are the kind of dolt who presumes that I'm dredging up ancient arguments about the value of non-representational art, read my words again. And again and again, until the truth of the matter sinks into your teensy little brain-ette.

That picture of Bea Arthur is representational. I myself enjoy doing abstracts, and I learned a great deal about color theory from an excellent abstract artist. I wish abstracts would regain their former popularity, since those works resist discussion in literary terms.

Unfortunately, most people -- even most art critics -- have no idea as to what constitutes a good abstract. Or a good painting of any sort.

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