Chemical weapons in Syria: Whodunnit?

Well, John Kerry may have achieved his "Colin Powell at the UN" moment...

In some of the administration’s most strident language, Mr. Kerry accused the Syrian government of cynically seeking to cover up the use of the weapons, and he rejected its denial of responsibility for a “cowardly crime.”

But where's the evidence? We're going to need something very, very, very convincing, given the history of prevarications that have been used to gin up wars in our recent (and not so recent) past.

From Moon Over Alabama a few days ago...

Videos of the incident show many people, including children, with respiratory problems. But non of the first responders and medical personal in those videos wear any protection against chemical weapons.

Real chemical weapons, like Sarin, are persistent agents. They stick to the cloth of the victims and any contact with those victims would practically guarantee to kill the people who try to help them unless those people take serious precautions. Whatever happened in Syria today is therefore unlikely to be the consequence of military grade chemical weapons. Many other chemical agents, like insecticides based on organophospate or some industrial process chemicals, could induce the observed symptoms.

It would of course be totally irrational for the Syrian government to use chemical weapons just the moment that chemical weapon inspectors arrive in the country. But it makes a lot of sense for the insurgents and their foreign supporters to create such an incident, as the did previously, and to use it to renew their propaganda campaign against the Syrian government. It is therefore no surprise that the British government immediately jumped all over the case.

(Emphasis added.) It's more than a little odd that the Syrian government would resort to such a measure at this time, when the rebels seem desperate...

See this blogger for a vigorous (and rather foul-mouthed, even by my standards) argument that the "attack" video constitutes a fake. Obviously, there are real victims here, and they were hit by something terrible -- but what, exactly, hit them?

An apparently well-informed person named Dan Kaszeta has offered an interesting report (pdf) on the attack near Damascus. Although Kaszeta does not offer conclusions on the "whodunnit" question, he does believe that the chemical agent was not sarin or any other nerve agent.

In the videos, people are standing around both the dead and injured. Medical providers, both professional and obvious amateurs are handling injured people and their clothing, with no protective equipment. Many dead bodies are handled with no gloves. If some of the dead and injured were contaminated with even minute amounts of nerve agent, other people would be getting ill very quickly.

a. Some victims appear to have miosis (pinpointed pupils), but some of them are clearly having a bright light shined in their eyes. Some of the supposed examples are not pronounced. (I examined my own pupils in the mirror while shaving to form a basis of comparison.) Diagnosing miosis merely by watching videos is very troublesome and inaccurate. (Note to medics: Use the dimmest light you can and creep in from the side of the eye, avoiding shining the light into the pupil itself.)

b. In the event of nerve agent use, pinpoint pupils would be nearly ubiquitous among the affected population. The people with more serious symptoms would also have pinpoint pupils. Some of the people in the videos with serious symptoms appear to have miosis, while others do not. In fact, some pupils appear dilated. (This can be a sign of atropine administration.)

Various witness accounts I have seen in the media have reported the following phenomena, some of which are inconsistent with nerve agents. It should be noted that, at the time of writing, all of these circumstances should be considered strictly anecdotal.
a. Burning sensations
b. People appearing to be dead “coming back to life” after some hours
c. Odor of sulfur. (Sarin is odorless. All of the nerve agents are odorless except at concentrationsthat are quickly lethal.)
d. Odor of “cooking gas” (cooking gases are odorless, but artificial scents such as mercaptans are added to indicate leaks)
e. Odor of vinegar
f.Odor of rotting fish
g. Drowsiness
h. Itchiness
i. Reddening of eyes

Taken in toto, these symptoms don't match any chemical agent known to Kaszeta. Later in the paper, he speculates on the possible use of a Toxic Industrial Chemical.

And now we get to what I consider the most important indicator (so far) that we are being hornswoggled. In the following, the initials "FSA" refer to "Free Syrian Army"...

Reuter published the following report, which was repeated elsewhere:

“Not all of the missiles appeared to have carried chemical warheads, the FSA spokesman said, but those that did were suspected to have contained sarin, a Russian-made nerve agent called SC3 and liquid ammonia supplied by Iran.” 7

I view this as highly suspect. It is nonsensical to me. The following reasons make this statement seem very strange to me:

1. I have made numerous inquiries among experts I know and have conducted extensive research in the various books and documents at my disposal. I can find no reference to any substance Russian/Soviet or otherwise, known as SC3. My inquiries continue and I have reached out to some former Soviet-bloc countries for more information.

2. SC3 is a nonsensical designation for an allegedly Russian chemical compound. S and C are the same character in the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian language. (I studied Russian language for 3 years in university and for a bit in graduate school as well.) Is this a transliteration error?

3. It is patently absurd to mix Sarin and liquid ammonia. Liquid ammonia reacts very quickly with Sarin due to its extreme pH. Liquid ammonia will inactivate Sarin within seconds or minutes depending on the concentration. Even someone with a basic knowledge of nerve agent chemistry ought to know that basic pH levels decontaminate Sarin. It seems perverse that someone would construct a device in this manner.

And it seems extremely telling that this "FSA" source felt obliged to get the Iranians into the story. As if Iran wants to get involved!

How on earth could anyone from the FSA know this stuff?

That unnecessary dig at Iran is the best evidence that we've entered Disinfo-land. Disinformation campaigns often injure their own credibility by taking things one step too far.

When I saw that Iran reference, my first reaction was straight out of Wrath of Kahn:  "LeDEEEEEEN!!!" And sure enough, our old friend has indeed been trying to link the planned regime change in Syria to the allegedly more pressing need for regime change in Iran. (As you will recall, Iran is Mikey's bete noir.) Here's the latest from Mikey's blog:

There are thousands of Iranian killers in the front lines, hailing from the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force and from Hezbollah, long the regime’s foreign legion. Iranian advisers tell Assad’s loyalists where and how to attack, and if the Syrians have indeed used chemical weapons, you can be sure the Iranians approved it, and were probably involved in the operations.

Do we really need to hear more? Sounds to me like that "FSA" statement quoted by Reuters was written in a certain office in Georgetown...

A word about the video/podcast embedded above: It comes from a source (the Corbett Report) that, under normal circumstances, I might not endorse. But in this instance, the information seems quite valid, and I strongly suggest that you give it a listen.

The interview brings up the possibility of a chlorine attack by the rebels. After some initial investigation, I've come to the tentative belief that the "chlorine theory" fits the symptoms listed above somewhat better than does the semi-official "sarin theory." But the matter still requires much further research.

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Everything old is new again

Have you noticed the trend? All sorts of old spook news is being presented as if it were new spook news. The latest example is a Foreign Policy story hidden behind a pay wall. The headline (by way of Memeorandum) reads:

Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran — The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history — and still gave him a hand.

Isn't this rather familiar? Whole books have been written about American aid to Saddam Hussein during the 1980s. First and foremost would be The Spider's Web by Allan Friedman, along with Kenneth Timmerman's The Death Lobby. Joseph Trento's Prelude to Terror gets into this area.

A week or so ago, we were gifted with the breathtaking revelation that the CIA has admitted to its role in the coup against the Iranian leader Mosaddegh in 1953. My response: Cah-MON. Around the time of the Iranian revolution of 1979, there were, like, a zillion news stories which talked about the bad things the CIA did in that country.

We also have allegedly new news about a possible conspiracy in the death of Princess Di. (We'll get to that soon -- promise.) But does the new news do more than recapitulate the old news? Maybe the BBC can drag out Rupert Allason to reassure the public once again.

To judge from some of the internet commentary I've seen, many younger Americans were genuinely shocked to learn that the NSA and Britain's GCHQ trade information all the time, thereby bypassing laws against domestic spying. (Our spooks eavesdrop on British citizens and their spooks spy on ours. Then the spooks trade data upon request. It's all very civilized.) If memory serves, this arrangement was discussed in James Banford's The Puzzle Palace in 1983.

Most Americans would be surprised to learn that the House Select Committee on Assassinations, flawed as it was, overturned the Warren Commission's "no conspiracy" verdict in the JFK case.

The most absurd example of this selective amnesia occurred in the later 1980s. I don't have the citation to hand, so you'll have to take my word for this. During the Iran-contra controversy, The New York Times published an article pooh-poohing then-current conspiracy theories. The piece included words to this effect: "Some people even say that the CIA tried to assassinate Fidel Castro." Snicker snicker; smirk smirk. "Oh those wacky conspiracy theorists! What will they think up next?"

Of course, the CIA did try to kill Castro. We've known all about those assassination attempts since the late 1960s, when the news broke in...(wait for it)...the New York Times.

A youthful citizenry which has more-or-less ceased to read non-fiction books is doomed live in a state of perpetual astonishment. I'm reminded of an old story which may or may not be true: Circa 1970, a writer was interviewing the famous model Twiggy, then in her 20s. For some reason, the interviewer mentioned the concentration camps. She had never heard of them. And she was floored to learn the details: "Six million? That's perfectly awful!"

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Syria

I think Booman is turning against Obama based on this Syrian "inspection for chemical weapons" BS. If Booman has finally had it with the guy...well. That's like Ann Coulter finally admitting that McCarthy was a jerk.

Nevertheless, it seems that the navies of Britain and the US are going to launch some sort of attack. If and when this happens, the Great Liberal Hope -- the guy given a premature Nobel Peace Prize -- will have finally managed to Dubya-ize himself.

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Spooks, war, financial skullduggery, Assange and Windows 8

Gotta move quickly...

That secret listening post. I thought that the preceding post -- which identifies the probable location of the secret base in the Middle East maintained by GCHQ (Britain's NSA) -- would get a lot of attention. Instead, this blog launched a lead balloon. Let's try again.

This follow-up story in The Telegraph recapitulates the first report in the Independent.

The Middle East listening station picks up messages and data travelling through the submarine cables in the region, which are then copied on to a computer system and examined.

The system was reportedly established while Labour was in Government, under a warrant signed by David Miliband, who was Foreign Secretary at the time.

I didn't notice Milibrand's name before. He became Foreign Secretary in 2007 and held the job until 2010. This small nugget of data fits in with my thesis that British spooks were responsible for the "cable cut" mystery of 2008.

Why do I harp on this? Back in 2008, some observers (including myself) wrote pieces warning that the cable cut "accidents" were too numerous and convenient to be accidental. But the public didn't listen to guys like me; the public preferred the reassurances of those mainstream writers who snickered at those wacky conspiracy theorists with their wacky ideas. "Undersea cables are accidentally severed all the time," we were told. Only a paranoid fool would suggest that spooks might resort to sabotage and trickery to scoop up data.

Well, here it is, five years later, and all signs indicate that I was right. So, like, neener.

Cass Sunstein. Obama has proposed an NSA review panel, and guess who he wants to be on it? Cass Sunstein.

If you've forgotten who he is, go here and here. In short: Sunstein was the genius who decided that the best way for the government to tamp down "conspiracy culture" would be to act conspiratorially. He wanted paid gummint shills to infiltrate conspiracy chat groups and toss water on the wildfires of lunacy.

Of course, a little common sense should reveal the big flaw in this plan: Inevitably, the existence of those shills would become known -- and after the Big Reveal, the looniest conspiratards would consider their beliefs to be confirmed. The wackos who think that Obama is a Muslim space vampire will redouble their efforts once they learn that the gummint has tried to censor the Muslim space vampire truthers.

A Harvard man, Cass is, and yet he couldn't figure that one out on his own. I can think of a word that rhymes with "Cass"...

Another reason to hate 8. The German government warns that Windows 8 contains a backdoor that says "Hey, hey, NSA -- come see what I'm doing today!"

The German government's documents allege that the group's core hardware element - a chip called the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), which appears in hardware built by Trusted Computing Group companies - interfaces directly with Windows 8 and enables Microsoft remote, unfettered access to any computer on which the operating system runs.

Apparently, Windows 7 (greatest OS ever!) is safe. Well, safer.

Also see here. 

Did you get the memo? I really should devote an entire post to this fine piece of investigative reporting by Greg Palast. If you think Larry Summers is bad now, wait until you read this...

The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3 percent unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.

The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank.

The NSA vs. Kim Dotcom. You may know that Kim is a Finnish-born "internet entrepreneur" in New Zealand who made a ton of money from the Medaupload site, which was shut down because it provided free goodies. The NZ government, acting at the behest of the US, arrested Kim; the gummint also got his lists of "customers." His case is a cause celebre among those scoundrels who like to use the internet to get free goodies.

We now learn that the NSA helped catch Kim, using PRISM. (Also see here.)

This is a Rubicon-crossing moment. Even if you hate guys like Kim, you should be concerned to see the NSA's capabilities used against a private citizen. He is not a terrorist or the representative of a foreign power. Cops are using now PRISM to keep citizens in line.

Haven't I been warning you folks that this would happen?

Julian Assange. Now I don't know what to make of this guy. First, he croons a love-song to the Randroid wing of the GOP. Then, we learn about...this.

...the Wikileaks Party revealed a new attempt to appeal to the far Right. In official election tickets lodged with the Australian Electoral Commission, they have said they want the fascist Australia First Party, the pro-shooting-in-National-Parks Shooters and Fishers Party , and the “mens rights activist” Non-Custodial Parents Party to win a seat instead of the Australian Greens. In New South Wales, if you take the easy option and just tick the Wikileaks Party box in the Senate, and if they don’t win, your vote will go to those three right-wing parties before it goes to the Greens.

In other words, the Wikileaks Party in Oz favors fascists over lefties. This move led to the implosion of the Wikileaks party.

Just yesterday, Assange offered a statement euphoniously titled "Google and the NSA: Who’s holding the ‘shit-bag’ now?" He makes some very good points about the many ways in which Google has fallen away from it's original "Don't be evil" philosophy:

Google started out as part of Californian graduate student culture around San Francisco’s Bay Area. But as Google grew it encountered the big bad world. It encountered barriers to its expansion in the form of complex political networks and foreign regulations. So it started doing what big bad American companies do, from Coca Cola to Northrop Grumman. It started leaning heavily on the State Department for support, and by doing so it entered into the Washington DC system. A recently released statistic shows that Google now spends even more money than Lockheed Martin on paid lobbyists in Washington.

That Google was taking NSA money in exchange for handing over people’s data comes as no surprise. When Google encountered the big bad world, Google itself got big and bad.

Yeah, well...here's the thing, Julian: You can't assail Google for playing the Washington game and simultaneously root for the most conservative wing of the Republican party to take power. As for those fascist groups you pal around with in Oz: They may not be "big and bad" yet, but they are indeed bad, and God help us if they ever make it big.

Syria. Ah...hell. There's just too much going on, and I need to draw this post to a close. So I'll give you just the basics: Although we've been repeatedly told that Syrian use of chemical weaponry justifies American intervention, the American people aren't falling for this line, and history suggests that the rebels, not the government, are the ones using chemical weapons.The Syrian government has welcomed inspectors, indicating that Assad is not the one with something to hide.

The American people are being uncharacteristically wise in their hesitation to become involved. We don't need to get bogged down in another Iraq. Syrian dictator Assad is no angel -- quite the opposite, in fact -- but the Al Nusra front, which seeks his overthrow, will probably be worse.

Let the Syrians work this one out.

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GC-Wiki and the location of that secret base in the Middle East

First, some housekeeping chores: After you read this piece, please check out the remarkable revelation in the preceding article about the death of Michael Hastings. The story below that introduces the important topic of "GC-Wiki," which is the topic of our current investigation. Since the piece you are about to read contains actual original research (woo hoo!) on an important topic, I hope that you, gentle reader, can help publicize this post.

Sadly, publishing this research means delaying two very interesting articles on Larry Summers and Princess Di. All of that material will appear soon. I hope. (Apologies to readers D and B, who helped me with those stories.)

Are we going to get to that original research now? Nope. First, a recap.

On the 22nd, the Independent published a piece about the NSA's ability to tap into undersea cables in the Middle East. The opening paragraphs suggested, but did not state, that the information came from NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden. Snowden responded angrily, claiming that he has never spoken to anyone from the Independent. Moreover, none of his stories have compromised operations in the Middle East.

(Nevertheless, many articles -- including this one from UPI -- have falsely claimed that Snowden was the source for the Independent's reportage.)

Those (few) who read deeply into the Independent's story learned that their writers got their information about undersea cables from a secret "spooks only" website called GC-Wiki. The "GC" is short for GCHQ, which is the British equivalent of the NSA. (The NSA and GCHQ have worked very closely together for many years.) The Independent then offered, en passant, a bombshell revelation: That Ed Snowden got a treasure trove of documents from GC-Wiki.

Information about the project was contained in 50,000 GCHQ documents that Mr Snowden downloaded during 2012. Many of them came from an internal Wikipedia-style information site called GC-Wiki. Unlike the public Wikipedia, GCHQ’s wiki was generally classified Top Secret or above.

I still don't understand how the Independent knew that about Snowden. But Snowden did not deny that claim; he simply denied working with the Independent.

The Independent story marked the very first mention of GC-Wiki anywhere in the "normal" online universe. Literally within minutes of the appearance of that story, a Wikipedia editor named Gareth Kegg put up a new entry devoted to GC-Wiki. (Thanks, B, for your help here.)

And yet it appears that certain journalists have known all about GC-Wiki for some time.

In an earlier stage of the Snowden controversy, I directed your attention to a little-noticed mystery. The Washington Post and the Guardian published what purported to be the same image from the same pdf report on the now-infamous NSA operation known as Prism. Thanks to the Independent, we now know that Snowden downloaded this material from GC-Wiki. (Apparently, the NYT is now going to have access to this same cache.)

But there was an odd discrepancy, first noted by Cryptome. The two images -- one published in the Washington Post, one published by the Guardian -- were not the same. And based on the Independent's revelations, the difference now seems crucial.

Let's take a close look at those images again -- and remember, these are supposed to be the same image:

I think you should have no problem spotting the difference. The WP image has been re-drawn to convey the impression that the NSA is tapping into cables solely within America's territorial waters. The Guardian image -- surely the original version, probably taken from GC-Wiki -- indicates that British and US spooks have tapped into cables all over the world.

We can play a subtler game of "spot the difference" if we take a closer look at the Independent story. 

One of the areas of concern in Whitehall is that details of the Middle East spying base which could identify its location could enter the public domain.

We are, in fact, going to identify the location of that secret base in this very post. Keep reading.

But first things first...

The data-gathering operation is part of a £1bn internet project still being assembled by GCHQ. It is part of the surveillance and monitoring system, code-named “Tempora”, whose wider aim is the global interception of digital communications, such as emails and text messages.

This is not the first mention of Tempora. As many of you already know, there was a flurry of Tempora stories toward the end of June. But these stories indicated that the Tempora project was restricted to the interception of cable traffic in and around the UK. See, for example, this piece and this article in the Atlantic. (Actually, the latter article indicates that cable interception is global, but does not specify the Middle East.)

I would also note that both President Obama and the New York Times have denounced Ed Snowden as a "hacker." Previously, I couldn't understand what Obama was talking about, since hacking played no role in any of the Guardian stories. However, now that we know that Snowden's documents came from GC-Wiki, we may surmise that he may not have had authorization to download them.

So why has everyone -- including Snowden! -- been so desperate to cover up the Middle East surveillance operation?

Hypocrisy plays a certain role here. Americans want the NSA to spy on that part of the world. We just don't want the NSA to read our emails.

But I suspect that a deeper reason has to do with the "cable cut" mystery of 2008, a once-hot controversy which everyone now seems to have forgotten.

I find it curious that the average person can read these words...

The station is able to tap into and extract data from the underwater fibre-optic cables passing through the region

...without asking how the NSA (or GCHQ) gained access to cables placed under the sea. Let's have another look at our "cable cut" post from 2008:

The "cable cut" mystery -- the strange destruction of undersea cables carrying internet traffic in the Middle East -- cannot be ignored. We now have a fifth incident.

Quoting TeleGeography and describing the effect the cuts had on the Internet world, Mahesh Jaishanker, executive director, Business Development and Marketing, du, said, “The submarine cable cuts in FLAG Europe-Asia cable 8.3km away from Alexandria, Egypt and SeaMeWe-4 affected at least 60 million users in India, 12 million in Pakistan, six million in Egypt and 4.7 million in Saudi Arabia.”

A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each.

These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

James Bond used to say that "three times is enemy action." What would he say about five incidents?

My instincts tell me that the purpose of inflicting this kind of damage would be to have the "right" people conduct the repair operations. The NSA may find it a whole lot easier to tap into the data stream once the patch job is complete.

Looks like my instincts may have been right. Of course, the repair crew may have come from GCHQ, not the NSA -- but the basic operation comes to the same thing.

There's another reason why everyone (including Snowden) has been so hesitant to talk about surveillance operations in the Middle East: The Israeli connection.

(Everyone is afraid to talk about the Israelis -- except, as we shall see, the French.)

The Independent says "Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East..." yet refuses to identify the location. In fact, we are told that the British government is desperate to keep the location secret.

Naturally, my first suspicions ran toward Unit 8200, Israel's much-vaunted version of the NSA.

My research suggests that this secret "station" is located within the Urim SIGINT base run by Unit 8200. From Wikipedia:

Urim is located in the Negev desert approximately 30km from Beersheba, a couple of kilometres north of the kibbutz of Urim. Until articles were published about the base in 2010, it was not known to the outside world.

The directions given above are not quite correct. If you look up Urim, Israel, on Google Earth, you will easily find the "secret" base -- replete with an impressive array of Satellite dishes -- roughly 2 km east of the kibbutz.

The following comes from Wikipedia (with emphasis added by me):

Created decades ago to monitor Intelsat satellites that relay international telephone calls, Urim was expanded to cover maritime communications (Inmarsat), and kept being expanded to intercept the signal communications of ever more communications satellites. Duncan Campbell, an intelligence specialist speculated that Urim is "akin to the UK-USA pact's Echelon satellite interception ground stations."[1] The Echelon system was set up by the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand as a global network of signal interception stations.

The reference to "Inmarsat" probably refers to the International Mobile Satellite Organization. However, the hyperlink in the Wikipedia entry goes to another article on a private British satellite company, also called Inmarsat. (It's almost as though someone at Wikipedia wanted a guy like me to go down this very research trail.)

Here's more on Urim, via Le Monde. Unlike the Brits and the Americans, French journalists are perfectly willing to talk about Israel's secrets:

The base, hidden until now, has rows of satellite dishes that covertly intercept phone calls, emails and other communications from the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia. Its antennas monitor shipping and would have spied on the aid ships in the days before they were seized...

A large circle in the farmland shows the site of a direction-finding antenna (HF/DF) for monitoring shipping.

I've noted similar circles near secret facilities in the US (as seen via Google Earth). Now we know their purpose.

The Urim base targets many nations, friend and foe. A former analyst at Unit 8200, a military service conscript, said she worked full time translating intercepted calls and emails from English and French into Hebrew. It was “interesting” work, studying routine communications to find the nuggets. Her section listened mostly to “diplomatic traffic and other off-shore [international] signals”.

And now for the "Tah-dah!" moment...

The Urim base, said our sources, is the centre of a spying network that taps undersea cables (notably Mediterranean cables linking Israel to Europe via Sicily) and has covert listening posts in Israeli embassy buildings abroad.

Do you think that Urim hosts the super-secret GCHQ/NSA listening post mentioned in the Independent report? I do.

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Hastings thought someone had tampered with his car

I didn't want to crowd out the preceding post so soon, because the topic is important and I even did a spot of original research on the GC-Wiki thing. So please go read the post below this one. And when you're done, read this L.A. Weekly article on Michael Hastings.

Turns out he told people he thought someone was tampering with his car. He even asked to borrow a friend's car because he did not trust his own. The helicopter thing may have been paranoia -- but on the other hand, do you recall the last act of Goodfellas?

The piece confirms earlier reports that he was working on an article about CIA Director John Brennan. Was that the story that got him killed?

I don't think so. As you may recall from a previous post, I found an intriguing clue: Just before the accident, he had sent messages to a guy named Ron Brynaert -- who was, and presumably still is, obsessed with the stranger aspects of the Wiener affair. The Breitbart-linked bloggers who went after Wiener also linked up with the underground war between spies and hackers. And...well, it gets complicated.

Now if you haven't done so already, go read the GC-Wiki thing. I'll have more to say about that soon. Something important, methinks.

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The Game of Spooks

The Independent published a startling story revealing a secret British surveillance effort -- involving undersea fiber optic cables -- in the Middle East.

The Independent goes to great lengths to give the impression -- without actually stating -- that their story came from documents provided by Ed Snowden. Careless readers will presume that Snowden is now working with the Independent, not the Guardian.

But Snowden insists that he has never worked in any way with any journalists connected with the Independent. Furthermore, he says that he has been careful not to release this type of information.

The Snowden revelations have concentrated on the NSA's efforts to scoop up information from American citizens, sans warrant. He has not divulged anything about British or American efforts to learn what is going on the Middle East.

Obviously, many Americans are likely to support a whistlebower who reveals hidden truths about unconstitutional domestic surveillance. They are not likely to support someone who reveals sources and methods in the Middle East.

So someone in the UK is trying to make people think that Snowden has upped his game, when in fact he has not. Here is part of Snowden's response:

It appears that the UK government is now seeking to create an appearance that the Guardian and Washington Post's disclosures are harmful, and they are doing so by intentionally leaking harmful information to The Independent and attributing it to others. The UK government should explain the reasoning behind this decision to disclose information that, were it released by a private citizen, they would argue is a criminal act.

Greenwald notes the suspicious timing:

and right as the UK government is trying to tell a court that there are serious dangers to the public safety from these documents, there suddenly appears exactly the type of disclosure the UK government wants but that has never happened before. That is why Snowden is making clear: despite the Independent's attempt to make it appears that it is so, he is not their source for that disclosure. Who, then, is?

Greenwald says that this is a tactic characteristic of the US government. But the Brits have also played this game, in exactly this way, many times.

One good US precedent does come to mind: Philip Agee, the CIA turncoat or whistleblower (take your pick). Back in the 1970s, CIA-friendly journalists mounted a massive disinformation campaign designed to convey the impression that Agee's revelations led to the death of a CIA station chief in Greece. The charge was not true, but the mud stuck.

Incidentally, previous Cannonfire posts have focused on the strange mysteries surrounding those undersea cables in the Middle East (the focus of the Independent's story). See here and here. Read those stories in conjunction with the Independent's latest; you tell me if it's all connected.

The GC-Wiki mystery. If you dig deeper into that Independent story, you'll find that their source of information is not really Ed Snowden but a site called GC-Wiki, a private "spooks only" wiki-type operation run by GCHQ, Britain's version of the NSA. If you hit the link in the previous sentence, you'll go to the "normal" Wikipedia's entry on GC-Wiki.

Here's what I find odd: That Wikipedia entry seems to be brand new -- the only citation goes to the above-mentioned Independent story. The entry appeared not days ago, but hours ago -- perhaps even minutes ago.

Thus, this very mysterious news story seems to be the first public mention of GC-Wiki anywhere in the world. At this writing, if you Google the term "GC-Wiki" in quotes, you will find no links other than the Wikipedia entry mentioned above. (There are links that go to a similarly-named but unconnected effort within the gaming community.) The Wikipedia entry says this:

The GC-Wiki was the source for many of the 50,000 documents downloaded by Edward Snowden which resulted in the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures

Okay. Let's think this through.

If Snowden got his documents from that "hidden" site -- and if the Independent got documents from that same site -- then how can the Independent's reporters try to leave readers with the impression that they were helped by Snowden?

Somehow -- and they won't say how -- the Independent's team of journalists got access (you might call it "independent access") to a site which is supposed to be available to intelligence personnel only.

I don't see how Snowden even figures into it.

I also don't see how the Independent would know that Snowden got documents from that site.

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Bales, Manning, Afghanistan

Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, the man blamed for an infamous massacre in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan (the 16 victims include men, women and children), is facing sentencing. His lawyer has asked for leniency.

Then survivors took the stand. The Army flew in nine of them. Yesterday, it was the turn of two men who'd been away from the village at the time of the massacre. They told the court what it was like to come home and find their families' partially-burned bodies stacked up like cordwood.

Forty-one-year-old Khamal Adin recalled seeing the corpse of an infant with a shoe print on her face. Then his cousin, Haji Muhammed Wazir, took the stand. He lost his mother, his wife, his brother and six of his seven children. Through an interpreter, Wazir said that even now, more than a year later, it feels to him as if the massacre is still happening.

After the prosecutor's last question, Wazir asked to make a further statement. The judge didn't allow it. That frustrated Wazir, who clearly had something more he'd planned say.

Too bad, because there is evidence that Bales was not the sole perpetrator of this atrocity:

The earliest news reports said that more than one party committed the crimes (in two separate locations, miles apart), and foreign press accounts continued to take that possibility seriously even after the military fingered Bales. Locals reported multiple killers who communicated via walkie-talkie. Survivors reported that the assassins were brought in by military helicopters.

The bodies were wrapped in blankets, stacked like logs, and set afire. I find it hard to believe that one man could move so many corpses, and wrap them in blankets -- while simultaneously holding his weapon. Think about it: If Bales had no helper covering him, he would have to keep the rifle in his hand and his finger near the trigger at all times.

Why would a lone killer even bother to burn the bodies (and thereby eradicate forensic evidence)?

Perhaps the reports of multiple assailants are in error, but so far, I've not seen anyone mount a detailed argument to that effect. I outlined the case for conspiracy in this earlier post:

How did he [Bales] get out of the base at 3 am unchallenged and without anyone’s knowledge? How did he manage to do so much damage alone?

We are told that, after killing a number of people in one village, Bales went back to his base to restock his ammo. I presume that the base has a guard. I also presume that a Staff Sergeant would need to give the guard a reason to be out and about at that time of night. Unfortunately, Bales' guilty plea means that we may never learn the details of how he (supposedly) got in and out.

Odd, isn't it, that the court decided to "edit" the eyewitness testimony so tightly?

I suspect that what Wazir wanted to tell the court had to do with a story reported in the Australian press but not our own: Days before the massacre, a bomb took out an American tank, and an officer told the villagers that there would be a retaliatory strike against the entire community.

‘After that, they came back to the village nearby the explosion site. The soldiers called all the people to come out of their houses and from the mosque,’ he said. ‘The Americans told the villagers ‘A bomb exploded on our vehicle. … We will get revenge for this incident by killing at least 20 of your people,’ Mr Rasool said.

Even after the massacre, the hell did not cease:

One Mokhoyan resident, Ahmad Shah Khan, told The Associated Press that after the bombing, U.S. soldiers and their Afghan army counterparts arrived in his village and made many of the male villagers stand against a wall.

"It looked like they were going to shoot us, and I was very afraid," Khan said. "Then a NATO soldier said through his translator that even our children will pay for this. Now they have done it and taken their revenge."

From Wikipedia:

Soldiers from the base have been linked to other atrocities and crimes. The 2010 Maywand District murders involved JBLM-based soldiers.[15] Also in 2010, a recently discharged AWOL soldier from JBLM shot a police officer in Salt Lake City.[18] In April 2011, a JBLM soldier killed his wife and 5-year-old son before killing himself.[16] In January 2012, a JBLM soldier murdered a Mount Rainier National Park ranger.[15] In two separate incidents, unrelated JBLM soldiers have been charged with waterboarding their children.[16]

Jorge Gonzalez, executive director of a veterans resource center near Fort Lewis, said that the Kandahar killings offer more proof that the base is dysfunctional: "This was not a rogue soldier. JBLM is a rogue base, with a severe leadership problem", he said in a statement.

Bales himself is known to have psychological difficulties. From the beginning, he has claimed to have no memory of what actually happened on that night. Nevertheless he has pleaded guilty (to avoid the death penalty) and has offered an apology. If he receives life with the possibility of parole, he could be out in 20 years.

So my questions are simple:

1. Will Bales receive more lenient treatment than Bradley Manning did?

2. Was Bales made the scapegoat for others? (In which case, shouldn't he receive leniency?)

3. Aren't the true villains the men who made policy in Afghanistan?

Before you answer the third question, let me reprint this segment from my previous post. This report comes from the former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan:.

The method employed is simple: Identify those who provide financial support or protection to the militants. And those who even have sympathies with them. Constitute teams which would go to the houses so identified, knock at the door and as soon as the wanted man appears, shoot him dead. At times a substitute is killed who may be a guest in the house but was unlucky to greet the intruders at the door. On an average about 50 night raids take place daily. And every night about 25 people are killed in cold blood in different parts of the country.

The abominable practice of night raids was introduced by that much trumpeted and widely acclaimed head of the US forces Gen Stanley McChrystal. The idea was to save US ammunition and soldiers on the one hand and to eliminate all those who show any inclination to support the resistance. The assassination of targeted persons in cold blood is an insidious innovation in counterinsurgency. McChrystal’s successor Gen David Petraeus continued this cowardly programme that has become an entrenched tool of policy in counter-terrorism.

And yet the one we are supposed to despise is poor Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning -- whose only real sin was releasing video proof of a similar atrocity.

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The prom

I'm still too frazzled to put together a proper post, but I wanted to jot down a thought. What follows is fluff. This blog usually reserves non-political trivia for the weekend -- but this week, the weekend starts early.

I've been catching up with a series called The Big Bang Theory, which is new to me even though many of you have followed it for years. Many episodes are laugh-out-loud funny, and the ladies are adorable. But the nerds on this show don't really resemble the nerds that I've known.

Sorry, but I don't think that science geeks spend all that much time thinking about boinking. At least, the nerds I've met don't continually express their thoughts about boinking. They don't act as if there were no other permissible topics of discussion, the way lumpenprole slobs might do.

Many years ago, I was talking to one of my college professors about (of all people) Gordon of Khartoum. I noted that some writers have suspected that Gordon might be gay because he never married. My prof's response: "It's easy to say that. A lot of people don't understand that the great men of history get to be the great men of history because they don't spend as much time as normal people do worrying about who takes whom to the prom."

At the time, I didn't agree. I saw myself as a potential Great Man of History yet I thought about girls all the freakin' time.

Maybe it's a function of age, but I find it easier now than then to understand what my professor was getting at. I also think that if I had spent more time doing stuff and less time thinking about girls, I might have gotten somewhere. Maybe I wouldn't have attained Gordon-of-Khartoumhood. But...somewhere.

My point is this: Our popular culture treats Da Boink as the sole worthwhile activity in all of human existence. In doing so, our culture misrepresents our experience and misleads young people.

As Malcolm Muggeridge (and just because I quote him here doesn't make him my favorite person) famously said: "The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment." We need not go back to the Cross. (And I'm not sure many people truly longed for it.) But if you're shopping for a raison d'etre, then orgasm -- howevermuch fun -- doesn't suffice.

Believe me, kids: After the first ten or twenty minutes of The Sole Worthwhile Activity In All Of Human Existence, a certain familiarity sets in, a certain repetitiveness, a certain is-that-all-there-is. This state of mind can be pleasantly spacey. But this is also the time when I tend to hear distant voices offering a droning rendition of Verdi's Anvil Chorus. Maybe that's why some people get into BDSM -- it gives 'em something to do aside from humming along with the Verdi.

For a young man, the best thing about orgasm is that, afterward, you finally have at least thirty minutes of not thinking about sex. At last, you can focus on writing your novel! Must get to work -- now! Alas, that's precisely the moment when she wants to cuddle.

Schtupping ain't everything. In fact, it's hardly anything. Monkeys schtupp. So do dogs and cats and beetles and anteaters and snails. But only human beings can design a Parthenon or sculpt a Pieta or erect the great statue of Gyuanin in Sanya.

There's another teevee show that makes a similar mistake: Da Vinci's Demons. I could stand to watch only one episode of that beautiful-looking irritation. Never mind the anachronisms, never mind the religious bigotry, and never mind the historical question of Lenny's homosexuality, which falls into the likely-but-unproven category. Bottom line: I've read more about Leonardo da Vinci than you (probably) have and -- unlike the writers of that show -- I've concluded that he (probably) wasn't a very sexual being. Even in his secret writings, he rarely addressed the subject of sex. When he did, he seemed to look upon the act with a cold eye, as though coitus were a bizarre biological process involving some alien species.

That attitude is impermissible and unthinkable to our current entertainment-creators. The people who write for television all presume that those of fine and famous mind were as rut-obsessed as is the lowest quasi-humanoid lumpenprole organism in the audience.  When Leonardo da Vinci was twenty, he wasn't like I was, or like you were, or like anyone you know. He didn't think about girls -- or even boys -- all the freakin' time. He had bigger fish to fry. And that's how he got to be Leonardo da Vinci.

Another thing: There's an early episode of Big Bang Theory in which a gifted artist wins a date with Penny by surreptitiously drawing her portrait. In real life, this trick doesn't work. Trust me. In fact, the results can be downright humiliating, because your sketchbook provides an excellent visual record of your failures.

On the other hand, I've heard that Stephen Ward used this very stratagem to assemble his harem (or whatever you want to call it). Bugger all! Why did it work for him and not me?

(Finally! I finally managed to get some politics into this post!)

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You need a vacation

Okay, I admit it. My brain is too frazzled (by some stuff completely unrelated to blogging or politics or anything of that sort) to sort through all of the NSA-related material that happened yesterday. So here's a quick non-spook-related post, one that may not make you very happy. It all comes down to this graphic, which I swiped from The Confluence.

 

 

Told you it wouldn't make you very happy. But the question is: How do we change the picture?

More libertarianism is not the answer.

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An overload of spooky stuff

Where to begin? Let's start here: The British sent some thugs to the Guardian offices to destroy hard drives that might contain Snowden's NSA material.

In an article posted on the British newspaper's website on Monday, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said that a month ago, after the newspaper had published several stories based on Snowden's material, a British official advised him: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back."

After further talks with the government, Rusbridger said, two "security experts" from Government Communications Headquarters, the British equivalent of the ultra-secretive U.S. National Security Agency, visited the Guardian's London offices.

In the building's basement, Rusbridger wrote, government officials watched as computers which contained material provided by Snowden were physically pulverized. "We can call off the black helicopters," Rusbridger says one of the officials joked.

Remember how, a couple of posts back, we defined "Chatty Terrorist Syndrome" (or CTS) which strikes whenever the NSA's snoopery needs justification? Well...

Two years ago, following the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, a number of journalists wrote dramatic accounts of the Al Qaeda leader’s last moments. One such story, co-authored by Eli Lake in the Washington Times, cited Obama administration officials and an unnamed military source, described how bin Laden had “reached for a weapon to try to defend himself” during the intense firefight at his compound, and then “was shot by Navy SEALs after trying to use a woman reputed to be his wife as a human shield.”

It was exciting stuff, but it turned out to have been fictitious propaganda concocted by U.S. authorities to destroy bin Laden’s image in the eyes of his followers. Based on what we know now, the SEALs met virtually no resistance at the compound, there was no firefight, bin Laden didn’t use a woman as a human shield, and he was unarmed.

The White House blamed the misleading early reports on the “fog of war,” but as Will Saletan pointed out in Slate, “A fog of war creates confusion, not a consistent story like the one about the human shield. The reason U.S. officials bought and sold this story is that it fit their larger indictment of Bin Laden. It reinforced the shameful picture of him hiding in a mansion while sending others to fight and die. It made him look like a coward.”

Harpers goes on to say what I've been saying all along: That the major CTS tales we've been recently told are probably just...yarns.

The sources for the story were three U.S. officials “familiar with the intelligence.” “This was like a meeting of the Legion of Doom,” one told Lake and Rogin. “All you need to do is look at that list of places we shut down to get a sense of who was on the phone call.”

The piece also cited Republican senator John McCain, who drew a predictably grim conclusion from the news. “This may punch a sizable hole in the theory that Al Qaeda is on the run,” he said. “There was a gross underestimation by this administration of Al Qaeda’s overall ability to replenish itself.” The story was picked up widely, especially on the right. On his show, Rush Limbaugh charged that the Obama “regime” had leaked the story for political gain.

For once, Rush may have been on to something. But Limbaugh can't bring himself to examine the possibility that the intelligence community (not simply a Democratic administration) may be concocting whoppers.

Limbaugh can't make that admission, because doing so requires looking at the history of Washington Times writer Eli Lake, known for spreading lies that helped pave the way for the Iraq war. Lake is now spreading the latest CTS "conference call" tales.

In a follow-up story published the day after the original article, Lake wrote that at the request of its sources, the Daily Beast was “withholding details about the technology al Qaeda used to conduct the conference call.” The suggestion was that the story had omitted information to keep terrorists from knowing too much about U.S. intelligence operations. But as Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor noted, “If a conference call of some sort took place, then the participants know full well how they did it. And the moment they see a news report that says the United States was listening in to the call, they’re going to shut that means of communication down.” Others wondered why, given the worldwide uproar about National Security Agency spying, Al Qaeda would risk gathering all of its top operatives for any form of simultaneous multiparty communication.

This business of intelligence concoctions brings us to this Salon story, which revisits the 2001-2002 myth of Bin Laden's underground lair. Remember that one? A widely reproduced graphic gave the world the impression that Bin Laden was a James Bond supervillain.

The myth of bin Laden’s subterranean fortress began with a story in the London Independent newspaper on November 27, 2001, which described a mountain honeycombed with tunnels, behind iron everything is a clue 301 doors, with “its own ventilation system and its own power, created by a hydroelectric generator,” capable of housing 2,000 people “like a hotel.” This story was quickly picked up and embellished by American media. The result was that on November 29th the Times (London) published a cutaway drawing titled “Bin Laden’s Mountain fortress,” showing thermal sensing equipment and tunnels wide enough for a car to drive through. … When “Meet the Press” was broadcast on December 2nd, Tim Russert showed the drawing to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suggested there might be many such sophisticated redoubts, and not only in Afghanistan.

When American forces arrived at Osama’s actual lair, they found something somewhat simpler. They found some caves.

The Salon story is one of those by-the-numbers pieces that criticizes America's affection for conspiracy stories. But the example chosen here works against the writer's intent. Those fake stories about Bin Laden's "Dr. No" compound didn't make themselves. Such things don't just happen. No, those stories were concoctions promulgated by the intelligence community.

You can affix any label you choose to such concoctions. But if you want to be accurate, you're going to have to reconcile yourself, at some point, to use of the dreaded C word. The only proper way to describe the graphic reproduced above is to admit that it was the result of a conspiracy to mislead the public.

(Oddly enough, a good discussion of the Bin Laden "fortress" myth comes to us by way of Edward Epstein, who is responsible for spreading quite a few myths of his own.  Epstein was the creature of the CIA's ultra-paranoid James J. Angleton. Under JJA's tutelage, Epstein wrote Legend, an outrageous attempt to pin the JFK assassination on the Russians.)

Let's bring our discussion back to the present day. Marcy Wheeler notes that the NSA has been telling some obvious lies about its capabilities lately...

Today, as part of a story describing that NSA still doesn’t know what Edward Snowden took from NSA, MSNBC quotes a source saying NSA has stinky audit capabilities.

Another said that the NSA has a poor audit capability, which is frustrating efforts to complete a damage assessment.

(We’ve long known this about NSA’s financial auditing function, and there have long been signs they couldn’t audit data either, but apparently MSNBC’s source agree.)

For the past several months, various Intelligence officials have assured Congress and the public that it keeps US person data very carefully guarded, so only authorized people can access it.

Today, MSNBC reports NSA had (has?) poor data compartmentalization.

NSA had poor data compartmentalization, said the sources, allowing Snowden, who was a system administrator, to roam freely across wide areas.

Again, there have long been signs that non-analysts had untracked access to very sensitive data. Multiple sources agree — and possibly not just non-analysts.

All of these stories lead us to one big question: Why should we believe anything the spooks tell us?

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Cellphone privacy

If you're arrested, do the cops have the right to go through your cellphone without a warrant? The Obama administration says yes.

In a petition filed earlier this month asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, the government argues that the First Circuit’s ruling conflicts with the rulings of several other appeals courts, as well as with earlier Supreme Court cases. Those earlier cases have given the police broad discretion to search possessions on the person of an arrested suspect, including notebooks, calendars and pagers. The government contends that a cellphone is no different than any other object a suspect might be carrying.

But as the storage capacity of cellphones rises, that position could become harder to defend. Our smart phones increasingly contain everything about our digital lives: our e-mails, text messages, photographs, browser histories and more. It would be troubling if the police had the power to get all that information with no warrant merely by arresting a suspect.

Arrest is not conviction, and an arrested suspect is, by definition, an innocent. Since anyone may be arrested -- during, for example, a political protest -- it should be obvious that the mere fact of arrest should not abrogate our rights to privacy.

The only reasons to bypass the warrant process have to do with time-critical situations. But if the suspect is already in custody, time is (in almost all cases) not a factor. Besides, the laws governing the use of warrants take emergencies into account.

Police work is easy only in a police state. Why is the Obama administration trying to establish one?

Let's give this post a bit of edginess. How can the black community continue to support Obama blindly when this policy will make oppression of black people easier? I've asked this question before and I'll ask it again: Can you name a single black person not named Obama whom Obama has helped?

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I can't wait...

I can't wait to write a defense of the People's Revolutionary Court that tries supercilious-yet-sycophantic media toadies like Michael Grunwald and condemns the whole lot of 'em to spend the rest of their lives doing grueling labor in the hot sun and in freezing cold, eating burned beans and sleeping in blankets infested with fire ants.

And I speak as one who recently became extremely ticked off at Assange for his pro-Libertarian statements.

By the way: Greenwald has vowed to make the UK pay for what it did. Go for it, GG!

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Intimidation, surveillance and "CTS"

Glenn Greenwald's live-in (we're supposed to use the word "partner," even though that word conjures up images of law firms and movies about mismatched cops) was stopped, questioned and harassed at Heathrow airport, for no good reason. The ordeal lasted more than nine hours.

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

As you know, strained rationalization is my favorite form of humor. That's why I'd like to hear the Brits explain why they considered Miranda a terrorist.

The "no fly" list seems to exist mostly for the purposes of political intimidation. As you may recall, during the Bush years, Anwar al-Awlaki was allowed to zoom in and out of the country even though, at the same time, any left-wing professor who had denounced the Iraq war could expect to find himself detained.

As Digby notes, right-wing pundits are very quick to denounce Chinese and Iranian authorities who have detained journalists and friends of journalists under exactly similar circumstances. The thing I find most appalling about right-wingers is their lack of absolute standards. Even though they often denounce the concept of situational ethics, they love to put the idea into practice.

Consider, for example, the vile Janet Shan at the mis-named "Moderate Voice." She applauds the use of Stalin-esque intimidation tactics against anyone she doesn't like:

What did Greenwald think would happen? That he and his lover could run around the world and not be subjected to scrutiny in light of the security leaks?

Yes, Janet. That's the point. Greenwald and his lover have exactly that right. Everyone has a right to expect not to be detained as a "terrorist" when there is no evidence to that effect.

Here's a detail you won't find in many articles about this incident:

“David is smart and strong,” Greenwald told Firedoglake. “But still, it was scary: Guardian lawyers were speculating all day that given how much time he was held – which is very rare – he’d possibly be arrested under a terrorism statute.”

“It’s speculation, but I think the only reason that didn’t happen was because Brazilian government at high levels intervened so aggressively and angrily,” Greenwald added.

The story of his partner being held in detention has become the biggest story in Brazil, according to Greenwald.

Well, I don't see the story on the front page of the English-language Rio Times, but Correio Braziliense is indeed giving the incident big play.

Incidentally, the same newspaper also carries a story originating in the German Bild about an alleged Al Qaeda plan to derail high-speed trains in Europe. Here's a translation of the key sentence:

The source of information is the National Security Agency (NSA, its acronym in English), U.S., who intercepted a phone conversation between members of the command of Al-Qaeda, a few weeks ago.

Once again, we see an example of Chatty Terrorist Syndrome. Very odd. In the past -- even before 9/11 -- many news accounts established that actual members of Al Qaeda are fully cognizant of the fact that Uncle overhears their phone conversations. That's why the Al Qaeda plotters referred to the World Trade Center attack as a "big wedding."

In a striking coincidence, Chatty Terrorist Syndrome (CTS) set in only after the Snowden revelations put heat on the NSA. Way I see it, only two scenarios can explain this sudden upsurge in cases of CTS:

Possibility 1: Terrorists are just screwing with the NSA.

Possibility 2. The NSA is screwing us.

The second possibility brings us to Juan Cole, whom I've not quoted (or read) in ages. But his latest (which references the harassment of Greenwald via his partner) is surprisingly hard-hitting:

How to turn a democracy into a STASI authoritarian state in 10 easy steps:

1. Misuse the concept of a Top Secret government document (say, the date of D-Day) and extend classification to trillions of mundane documents a year.

2. Classify all government crimes and violations of the Constitution as secret

3. Create a class of 4.5 million privileged individuals, many of them corporate employees, with access to classified documents but allege it is illegal for public to see leaked classified documents

4. Spy on the public in violation of the Constitution

5. Classify environmental activists as terrorists while allowing Big Coal and Big Oil to pollute and destroy the planet

6. Share info gained from NSA spying on public with DEA, FBI, local law enforcement to protect pharmaceuticals & liquor industry from competition from pot, or to protect polluters from activists

7. Falsify to judges and defense attorneys how allegedly incriminating info was discovered

8. Lie and deny to Congress you are spying on the public.

9. Criminalize the revelation of government crimes and spying as Espionage

10. Further criminalize whistleblowing as “Terrorism”, have compradors arrest innocent people, detain them, and confiscate personal effects with no cause or warrant (i.e. David Miranda, partner of Glenn Greenwald)

Presto, what looks like a democracy is really an authoritarian state ruling on its own behalf and that of 2000 corporations, databasing the activities of 312 million innocent citizens and actively helping destroy the planet while forestalling climate activism.

Take special note of that "2000 corporations" comment. Despite what we've heard from libertarian fools like Julian Assange and Jeff Bezos, the surveillance state exists to serve the corporate state. That's why the presidents who talked the libertarian talk before attaining office -- Reagan, Dubya -- presided over a national security apparat which became ever more Orwellian.

Added note: For some reason, Wikileaks chose this moment to release 46 gigs (!!!) of "insurance files." That's a huge number. I'd be downloading the torrent right now, but for one problem: I don't have enough disc space on my C drive!

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The burning of the Coptic churches

I had hoped to avoid comment on the painful civil war besetting Egypt right now. One does not want to side with a military coup that has ousted an elected government. Moreover, I have no desire to say anything that might be construed as sympathetic to the type of low Islamophobic bigotry one associates with the likes of Pam Geller.

But we must face facts. Since the downfall of Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has behaved abominably, especially toward the persecuted Coptic Christians.

The image to your right shows the fate of an ancient and quite beautiful church in Minya. The Islamists have pillaged and destroyed historic churches throughout Egypt...

According to the website nilerevolt.wordpress.com, there was one church burnt in Alexandria, one in Arish, eight in Assiut, two in Beni Suef, one in Cairo, six in Fayoum, one in Gharbiya, two in Giza, around 12 in Minya, one in Qena, five in Sohag, and five in Suez. One of Egypt’s oldest churches, the Virgin Mary in Minya was engulfed in flames. The church goes back to the fourth century. Among more churches burnt were St Mina, Baptist church status of Bani Mazar, Saint Mark, Jesuit Fathers, the Greek church and Franciscan fathers, Saint Maximus, Saint Mark, Virgin and Anba Abram, Saint George, Virgin Lady, and Prince Taodharos Elchatbi.

This is in addition to at least 11 Christian institutions in Cairo, Fayoum, Assiut and Minya.

Many Copts were also injured. It was reported that at least 15 worshipers were seriously injured while praying in churches.

Nuns and priests fled to neighbouring rooftops after their churches were torched. Smoke and flames rose while the screams of nuns filled the air. Citizens banded together in front of churches all over Egypt’s governorates to protect them against attacks by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sources are unclear as to whether The Church of Saint Mark in Assiut has survived the onslaught. That church was the site of the phenomena described in this 2008 post. As noted on that earlier occasion, I am not inclined toward any kind of supernatural explanation -- but if (as one reader suggested) what people saw and videotaped was an example of St. Elmo's Fire, then the world has never seen a more striking example.

During the past few days, Egypt has experienced a descent into barbarism. One can only compare these events to the Taliban's vile decision to eradicate the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Years ago, I met a couple who live not far from the Giza plateau. The wife told me that local Mulsim children were encouraged by Islamic teachers to throw stones at the Sphinx. If the Muslim Brotherhood has its way, Egypt's most famous sculpture could end up like the Buddhas of Afghanistan.

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Looking forward to the end of Summers?

A little while ago, I advocated working with the liberatarians -- whom I cannot stand -- on privacy issues. Why? Because libertarians of the more principled sort are good on those issues, and because anyone hoping to participate in a mass movement cannot be too exclusionary.

We also have a movement composed of people who insist that Larry Summers should not be named chairman of the Fed. I like everything about this movement except for the folks behind it: The Markos Moulisas Cheetohead brigade. As did many of you, I fell out with that crowd back in 2008 and stayed out.

Still, these sentiments (mostly) sit well with me...

Dear President Obama:

It is unconscionable that Larry Summers—an architect and cheerleader for the financial deregulation that ruined our economy—would be appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Please do not appoint him, and instead consider this an opportunity to shatter a glass ceiling by appointing a qualified woman to this powerful position.

The estrogen-based part of this statement doesn't mean as much to me as does the idea of keeping Summers well away from this august position. Janet Yellen is obviously the better choice -- and to my mind, her sex should not enter into the equation.

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(Most of) the kids are all right

This is somewhat gratifying....

Young people, by 60% to 34%, think that the NSA leak serves the public interest. Americans 30 and older are divided (46% serves vs. 47% harms).

I'll name one oldster who just doesn't get it: Senator Diane Feinstein.

“The majority of these ‘compliance incidents’ are, therefore, unintentional and do not involve any inappropriate surveillance of Americans,” Feinstein said.

God, I can't stand that woman. I've voted for her in the past -- she is, sorry to say, a Democrat -- but every time I cast that ballot I held my nostrils together so tight they didn't loosen up again for weeks. In the face of the latest revelations of NSA outrages, revelations which even Pelosi declared "distrubing," Feinstein offered a supremely annoying response:

Whatever incidents had occurred, Feinstein added, “have been the inadvertent result of human error or technical defect and have been promptly reported and remedied.”

Yes, and Auschwitz was simply an accounting problem.

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A new Church committee...?

After the WP released its latest revelation of NSA abuses, The Atlantic has demanded a new version of the Church Committee. Younger readers may not know that this is a reference to the congressional inquiry headed by Frank Church, the senator who investigated CIA abuses in the early 1970s.

Let's review the NSA's recent history of serial illegality. President George W. Bush presided over the first wave. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, he signed a secret order that triggered a massive program of warrantless wiretapping. NSA analysts believed they possessed the authority to spy on the phone calls and emails of American citizens without a judge's permission. Circa October 2001, 90 NSA employees knew about the illegal program, but the public didn't. Later that month, four members of Congress, including Nancy Pelosi, were told of its existence, and subsequently discredited White House lawyer John Yoo wrote the first analysis of its legality. By 2002, 500 people knew about it, at which point telecom providers were participating.

The public didn't find out about warrantless wiretapping until December 2005, more than four years after it started, when the New York Times published a story that they'd long been holding.

Keep these words in mind the next time some idiot tries to sell you on the notion that conspiracies can't exist because nobody in Washington knows how to keep a secret.

Now any member of Congress who doesn't press for an investigation is behaving indefensibly, for the Washington Post has just reported that the NSA violated the law on a much larger scale than anyone admitted. Its report shows that current oversight is laughably inadequate, and includes enough details to suggest that multiple NSA defenders have been lying in their public statements.

Let me tell you the reason why we won't see another Church committee. It's a bit of history that most people have forgotten. Church lost by the thinnest of margins in 1980. Here's the Wikipedia version...

In the late 1970s, Church was a main congressional supporter of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which proposed to return the Panama Canal to Panama. The latter position proved to be widely unpopular in Idaho and led to the formation of the "Anybody But Church Committee" (ABC), committee created by the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), based in Washington, D.C. ABC and NCPAC had no formal connection with the 1980 Senate campaign of conservative Republican congressman Steve Symms, which permitted them, under former Federal election law, to spend as much as they could raise to defeat Church.[24]

Church lost in his attempt for a fifth term to Symms by less than one percent of the vote. His defeat was blamed on the activities of the Anybody But Church Committee and the national media's early announcement of Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan's overwhelming win in Idaho. These predictions were broadcast before polls closed statewide, specifically in the Pacific Time Zone in the north. Many believed that this caused many Democrats in the more politically moderate Idaho Panhandle to not vote at all. As of 2013, Church is the last Democrat to represent Idaho in the U.S. Senate.

The part that Wikipedia doesn't tell you is that there were serious allegations (published, if memory serves, in Covert Action Information Bulletin) that the CIA used cut-outs to funnel money to NCPAC, the group behind Anyone But Church. Carl "Spitz" Channel of NCPAC was later involved with various dubious schemes to raise money for the contras. A very spooky guy, Spitz was. He met with an unusual end, if I recall correctly....

How many current senators would take the risk...?

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Clockwork Orange: The continuing project

Sorry for the lack of posting; I've got stuff to do. But I did want to direct your attention to the new project undertaken by Adam Curtis, the famed British documentarian who gave us The Power of Nightmares. It seems to be called Bugger.

It ties in with a lot of books I've been re-reading lately -- books about the CIA's James Jesus Angleton and his British followers. As you know, I think JJA masterminded the plot against JFK. But the Angletonians in the UK, as personified by Peter Wright, masterminded a plot of their own against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and against the former head of MI5 Roger Hollis.

Both were suspected of being Soviet spies. And in both cases, the evidence was non-existent.

All of that nonsense ultimately traced back to the international cult of Angleton. Angleton himself, like Joe McCarthy, was a drunk. It's odd how substance abuse plays such a large role in right-wing fantasyland.

The British aspect of this intrigue is a tale best told in two books I highly recommend, David Leigh's The Wilson Plot and Smear!, a masterwork by Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorrill, the founders of Lobster. (Ramsay and Dorrill has since had an acrimonious split.) Curtis seems ready to delve into this territory, but -- as it often the case with him -- he casts his net much wider. Perhaps too wide.

The plot against Wilson was, amusingly enough, code-named Clockwork Orange. If you care to get "Wikipedia deep" into the matter, go here and then here and then here.

Is this history relevant to our time? Of course. Angletonism is alive and well -- in fact, it is a driving force within the contemporary Tea Party right.  One might consider Angleton's mail-opening program to be the forerunner of the NSA's current outrages. Every time you see a right-wing blogger (or a pundit of the Ann Coulter school) speak as though all Democrats are secret bolshies, you're hearing from the ghost of Angleton.

Clockwork Orange never died. 

More to come...

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Narcissism

As the military-intelligence complex becomes more oppressive, the chances increase that dissenters within the ranks will leak information -- not to any real or imagined "enemy,' but to us. Of course, the day may come when the American citizenry will be the only "enemy" left.

The government and their media toadies have concocted what we may call a "new cliche" to explain away these pesky whistleblowers. Anyone who warns the world about covert wrongdoing runs the risk of being labeled a narcissist or a megalomaniac.

That's the theme we've often heard in recent weeks.

It was sounded just now, during the sentencing phase of Bradley Manning's trial. I'm not interested in the question of Manning's gender identification, which does not strike me as relevant to the case (even though most observers seem unduly fascinated by the sexual issues, as people usually are). What bugs me is nonsense like this:

Navy Captain Dr. David Moulton, an expert forensic psychologist detailed to the case to review Manning, took the stand as a defense witness.

Doctor Moulton found traits of “narcissistic personality,” “borderline personality,” and “abnormal personality” in Manning.

Moulton is the defense witness, folks. The absurd logic of trials often requires shrinks to spout nonsense about a defendant during the sentencing phase. The prosecution favored us with a variant of the same tune:

The government’s cross-examination questions to Dr. Worsley focused on its view that Manning’s behavior indicated narcissism or an inability to show empathy with others. Dr. Worsley made a point that someone could seem narcissistic simply because they feel inadequate, not because they’re necessarily narcissistic.

The government prosecutor was persistent in asking about Bradley Manning denying his role in his problems in sessions with Dr. Worsley.

Government officials (and some media) think all leakers must be narcissists. (Note: never mind that the drive to inform the general citizenry of things it should know for its own general benefit is actually showing empathy with and connection to others, and not necessarily a manifestation of a purely “Me first and only!” mindset.) That may partly explain why this line of questioning was pursued here today by the prosecution.

(Emphasis added.)

Dig: We are supposed to believe that Manning is the one who displayed an "inability to show empathy with others." In fact, that poor fellow is where he is precisely because he dared to feel some empathy with the (non-white) victims of the atrocity documented in the "collateral damage" video.

Meanwhile, we are supposed to believe that our Generals, Colonels and other officers are never guilty of narcissism. (Even Patton would have guffawed after reading the preceding sentence.) Barack Obama has countenanced torture -- not to mention numerous broken promises to the working class -- yet no-one accuses him of lacking empathy.

Of course, shrinks never use words like "narcissist" and "megalomaniac" to describe Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and all of those other media blowhards who hate Manning.

Conscience-free super-snitch Adrian Lamo -- a man who has never shown any contrition even though he bears no small amount of responsibility for Manning's torment -- made sure than an entire movie told the tale of his glorious exploits. Lamo's Twitter feed features this epigram: “you cannot harm one who has dreamed a dream like mine.” Nevertheless, our media does not repeatedly characterize Lamo as a narcissist or a megalomaniac.

And yet, just today, two psychiatric prostitutes were willing to testify under oath that young, idealistic Bradley Manning -- yes, Bradley Freakin' Manning -- is the one who deserves to be called an empathy-challenged solipsistic egomaniac.

Future historians will need to invent a word stronger than "hypocrisy" to describe our times.

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As I thought...

Larry Summers almost has a lock on the Fed Chair position.

The trial balloon, it seems, has floated: Albert Hunt, today, puts Larry Summers’s chances of getting nominated as Fed Chair at 65%, saying that he has the support of just about everybody in the Obama administration not named Valerie Jarrett.

Obama continues to play the Lucy role, and we continue to be Charlie Brown. (See previous post.) Yes, I got my hopes up -- again -- when the media announced that there would be serious investigations of mortgage fraud on the part of B of A and Chase. But as Matt Taibbi notes, any actions will probably result in nothing more than fines, which the banks will simply consider the price of doing business.

But to me, these investigations will be meaningless unless one of two things happens, once they reach the inevitable stage of concluding painstakingly-crafted settlements with the inevitable teams of high-priced lawyers for the offending firms:

1) Someone goes to jail.

2) The company is ordered to break itself up into smaller pieces.

As to point one, here's the thing. If criminal laws were violated, then the government certainly has discretion to exercise mercy and seek non-criminal sanctions against the individuals responsible. But they can really only do that and not be total hypocrites if they also simultaneously implement leniency programs for ordinary street criminals at the same time.

Just yesterday, for instance, a federal judge in Mississippi handed down a six-month sentence to a man and ordered him to pay $8,282 in restitution for food stamp fraud – one Stanley Jones apparently lied in an application about whether or not anyone in his household had ever been convicted of a felony drug charge when he applied for food stamps.

Meanwhile, S.E.C. target Fab Tourre – the Goldman exec who joked about selling bad bonds to "widows and orphans" – will not do a day in jail for his part in a fraud that caused two banks in Europe to lose over a billion dollars. And Fab's restitution will range from $30,000 to $780,000, depending upon how much judge Katherine Forrest decides to ding him for each of his six counts of civil fraud.

I haven't checked recently. Is the right-wing media machine still droning on about what a socialist Barack Obama supposedly is?

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