They repeatedly made the case how vital Afghanistan was. Afghanistan, informed 60 Minutes, costs $300 million a day. There were videos of schools being built, fortifications being made, roads being graded. Heavy US equipment was everywhere.
The MRAPs explosive resistant truck has morphed into a gigantic armored beast you’d imagine at home in a science-fiction movie set on a hostile desert planet. It looked invulnerable. It also looked like the very picture of fail.
There were 50 some al Qaeda men left in Afghanistan, 60 Minutes estimated.
Here at home, everything rots except the fortunes of those building MRAPs and providing supply for the war.
“Over the last couple of years, about 250,000 teachers have been laid off back home … ” reporter Scott Pelley said. “The U.S. has 98,000 troops here, plus 40,000 from NATO,” he said a bit earlier.
Ryan Crocker wore a dashing pair of sunglasses inside a helicopter.
New Empire’s Dog Feces material, lads, Wired and Reuters on the excrement stick about a computer virus (a keystroke logger) on the Creech AFB network used to control Predator drone missions.
No links.
Full of anonymous sources, obvious US mil tech geeks getting erections over spilling the beans, readers are informed no one is panicking yet.
It’s safe to say malware as well as spyware has probably been found wherever we have networked computers involved in killing various paupers around the world.
“Holy s—, man!” I hear someone mutter. “It’s Predator drones!”
Yeah, so? All things considered, what took so long?
A recent investigative feature from a Denver newspaper goes into the case of Najibullah Zazi, the failed terrorist who wished to make subway bombs from beauty parlor supply store chemicals.
The paper relates the counter-terror operation that nabbed him. The government intercepted e-mails, was quickly on the stick and tailed Zazi all the way to New York City.
The newspaper compares him to Mohammed Atta.
Atta, however, appeared to be no fool. And his efforts actually worked — spectacularly from the point of view of al Qaeda.
Zazi, on the other hand, was like many al Qaeda men who apparently believe everything they read in newspapers about how easy it is to make explosives from recipes found on the net. They reason that since it is in print, it must be so.
The bomb-making instructions the FBI recovered from Zazi’s e-mails showed sophistication. According to the FBI, 30 grams of the substance Zazi wrote about would be enough to blow up a concrete block. Zazi’s notes indicate he intended to make up to 10 pounds — enough to blow up subway cars and everyone in them, Olson said.
“These guys were familiar with the New York subway. They knew what trains are most crowded when, and that’s what they focused on.” Olson added. “It would have been catastrophic.”
But he was caught because, starting Aug. 28, 2009, he began trying to make the explosives in the hotel room and failed every time. He frantically e-mailed an al-Qaeda facilitator in Pak istan named Ahmad, and it was those e-mails that the FBI intercepted.
In the end, Zazi’s major undoing was that he was either a bad chemist or took poor notes, Olson said.
DD has long maintained the real world is not interested in the stupid beliefs of counter-terror men and would-be terrorists who think all kinds of insta-mayhem-magic is at their fingertips on the Internet.
However, one can judge the quality of the jihadist by their reliance on such things. And history has show, again and again, that quality is very poor. If one is going to make improvised explosive devices, there’ are shortcuts to be had when trying to acquire a practical capability.
The men in the 9/11 attack did not rely on received wisdoms read in newspapers or Internet recipes.
And, as a side bit of history, they illustrate that if you run through your best soldiers in a kamikaze attack, no matter how spectacular the success, you may not find such resourceful human capital again.
The latest story on “homegrown” alleged terrorist Rezwan Ferdaus, aka “Bollywood,” caught in one of the FBI’s fictitious plots reminds DD of the hapless motorcycle gangsters from Clint Eastwood’s Any Which Way You Can.
You can count on the usual terrorism experts to wring their hands and warn balefully about the ingenuity of the perpetrator.
If you do the arithmetic on the amount of C-4 the government was said to have baited him with, it means Bollywood actually thought he could hurt the Pentagon with 15 pounds of the stuff. (And bring down some bridges with the leftovers.)
Ferdaus was, the newspaper says, someone with a bachelor’s degree in physics from Northeastern.
Hmmm, apparently this did not include contemplating the energy carried by large masses in motion. As contrasted with small ones. (The truth is, and laymen may not know it, is that bachelor’s degrees in the hard sciences in the US don’t usually qualify one for anything other than being someone’s minor lab assistant.)
We may see the occasional success here and there but they really do appear to be the exceptions to the rule.
Naturally, you’ll never see this conclusion pushed by our counter-terror experts or in any big newspapers. It creates static for an environment in which the eternal war footing can be maintained.
American intelligence officials recently warned that AQAP is actively involved in efforts to produce the deadly poison ricin for use in attacks inside the United States. According to analysts, the poison would likely be packed around small explosive charges that would disperse the deadly toxin on detonation. Ricin is so deadly that even a minute quantity can kill someone if inhaled or otherwise absorbed into the blood stream. But while American intelligence is aggressively pursuing investigation of this threat, it’s severely hampered by the chaos on the ground in Yemen. The virtual collapse of Yemen’s government has allowed Al Qaeda to expand its operations throughout the country …
The truth is, there is no finish line – there is only eternal vigilance.
The tagline: “Charles Faddis is a retired CIA covert operations officer and the former head of the Agency’s WMD terrorism unit.”
The CIA’s WMD terrorism unit? No WMD’s (in their real sense) have been found during the decade of the war on terror. That is ZERO.
“[Faddis] is author of, Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, and, Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security. His first novel, Codename Aphrodite, which is based on his experiences as a covert operative abroad, was published in June …”
And if you’re wondering why DD has never had a book on the subject, the answer is fairly obvious. In a world where the stuff published is as you see above, of what monetary value is the material found here?
Rhetorical, of course. The only consolation is that you can’t pay regular people enough to make them read the ocean of books like those cited.
The United States is building a ring of secret drone bases in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula as part of an aggressive campaign against al Qaeda affiliates in Somalia and Yemen, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing U.S. officials.
One base for the unmanned aircraft is being established in Ethiopia and another base has been installed in the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, the newspaper reported.
A small fleet of “hunter-killer” drones resumed operations in the islands this month after an experimental mission demonstrated that the unmanned drones could effectively patrol Somalia from there, the report said.
The U.S. military also has flown drones over Somalia and Yemen from bases in the African nation of Djibouti and the CIA is building a secret airstrip in the Arabian Peninsula to deploy drones over Yemen, the article said.
The Empire’s dog feces American innovation and technical supremacy on display, for knuckling a few of the poorest as long as we like, so that the 45 million on food stamps and those who aren’t can allegedly sleep easier.
In addition to the philosophical differences with encouraging government funding for private companies, critics say the Department of Energy gave Solyndra favorable treatment in the loan approval process due to its tight relationship with administration officials.
They point out that one of the company’s main financial backers, billionaire George Kaiser, is also a big Democratic campaign donor.
Now the company’s bankruptcy has become a case study on an issue likely to gain increasing attention: Should the government be investing taxpayer dollars in promising — but risky — startup companies?
All of the mainstream media will play dumb. Propping up crappy firms with taxpayer dough! Heresy!
Lots of people will stupidly act like it’s rare, or should be.
They will conveniently ignore that one of the primary functions of the Department of Homeland Security, over the past decade, was to do the same thing. And for most of the time we were under GOP rule.
The taxpayer propped up hundreds, maybe thousands, of small businesses promising technology to fight the war on terror. Most of it either totally flopped or has never paid off in any big way.
WASHINGTON — A $36 million anti-terrorism program designed to detect bombs on airline passengers by shooting air blasts to dislodge explosive particles is being scuttled because the machines proved unreliable at airports.
The “puffer” machines — glass portals that passengers enter for checkpoint screening — are being removed after the Transportation Security Administration spent $6.2 million on maintenance since 2005. Removing them will cost nearly $1 million, TSA spokeswoman Sterling Payne said.
Problems emerged after the TSA bought 207 puffers for $30 million starting in 2004. Ninety-four were installed in 37 airports. The other 113 machines stayed in storage.
Dirt and humidity in airports led to frequent breakdowns, Payne said. The TSA has removed 60 puffers and will pull the rest but has no deadline. The puffers, costing $160,000 each, attempted to identify bomb residue on clothing. They were used as added screening on passengers who had gone through metal detectors.
Some of the machines had trouble detecting bombs, said Hasbrouck Miller, a vice president of puffer manufacturer Smiths Detection. “It was a torturous four years,” Miller said, describing repair efforts …
One can make the argument the only reason the company hasn’t gone out of business is because of continuous taxpayer funding courtesy of multiple federal agencies.
And dead Jack Murtha’s career was virtually defined by it during the big years of the war on terror. When he died, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity lost its government fixer and its effort to get a big bioterror defense vaccine production center slowly collapsed.
Over the weekend, from internal DD e-mail, the opine of one of our few public service security experts:
As I drove in this AM there was the “Threat Alert” ( based on an uncorroborated report) that al Q would do a car or truck bomb attack in either NY or Wash DC.
I wouldn’t think that would be any great problem for anyone these days, but I will bet you a big bag of my very best marbles that it is spurious information and that nothing will happen.
An intelligence report this summer warned that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was seeking castor beans, the simple but deadly ingredient needed to make a quick and lethal dose of the poison ricin. One concern was that ricin might be used in a subway attack, combined with an explosion to disperse the deadly toxin through the closed tunnels of a subway system. This is a scenario the U.S. military has long feared, going back to the 1960s and 1970s, and the sarin gas attack in Japan’s subways in the 1990s showed its lethality.
[Incompetent. Ricin is not quick. Initial symptoms of ricin poisoning take a few hours to show up. Death from a lethal dose, depending on the amount, can take from one to three days.]
2. Radiological Bombs
The so-called dirty bomb has been an obsession of U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials for years, dating to 2002, when the FBI suspected an Illinois man named Jose Padilla of plotting such an attack. Padilla was ultimately convicted of other crimes. Still, officials recognize it would be fairly easy for a terror group to collect radiological waste from hospital machines overseas and package it with an explosive.
[Incompetent citation, again. Jose Padilla thought he could enrich uranium by swinging it in a bucket tied to a rope.]
5. Cyberterrorism
…With the help of a state sponsor well versed in cyberwarfare, a terror group could shut down parts of the U.S. electric grid, cause havoc with financial trades …
[The electrical grid and Wall Street memes, repeated in almost every story on cyberterror/cyberwar.]
“John Solomon is the editor of news and investigations for Newsweek and The Daily Beast,” reads the tagline.
