Defining "terrorism" and deciding who's behind a "terrorist" attack prematurely as a form of propaganda

of course i've been following the situation in syria and the damascus suicide bombing without the slightest notion of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys (although i am strongly leaning toward the belief that both sides are pretty bad)... i also have no firm idea of who is propping up the assad regime and who is giving support to the rebels... that both the u.s. and israel have their hands in the matter up to their elbows i think is almost a given and that both of them would certainly like to see a regime emerge, no matter how brutal or totalitarian, that would befriend the u.s., tolerate israel and serve as a buffer to iran as well as turn a cold shoulder to russia and china, is hardly in doubt... it's also very interesting to note, as glenn points out, that news reports on the damascus bombing have pointedly avoided labeling it as a "terrorist" attack...

so, how utterly convenient to have the "terrorist" bulgarian bus bombing suddenly occur that, without preamble or investigation, israel can blame first on iran and, on further consideration, iran via hezbollah... israel and the israel-besotted neo-cons steering u.s. foreign policy would like nothing better than to turn loose the dogs of war in the region and will go to any lengths to make it happen... this is just another thing they can point to but, cynic that i am, would not put it out of the realm of possibility that mossad is behind it... true, it's hard to conceive of israel killing its own citizens but, given the total nutcases in charge, it's not out of the question...

glenn, as always, does a masterful job of dissecting the meaning and justifiability of terrorism in the bulgarian bus bombing in similar fashion to the job he did a few days ago with the damascus suicide bombing which, added to the analysis of "terrorism" he has been doing all along, provides a much-needed perspective on the reality of events...

meanwhile, cnn reports this...

In a televised statement Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attack was "perpetrated by Hezbollah, Iran's leading terrorist proxy," as part of a global campaign that has reached a dozen countries on five continents.

But he offered no evidence. Israel's U.S. Embassy said Wednesday that it had no proof that Iran was the instigator of the attack.

mmm-hmmm...

oh, and btw, will the colorado movie theater massacre be labeled "terrorism"...? somehow, i don't think so...

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Reuters interview with Mike McConnell on cybersecurity - a misinformation case study

we're all reasonably aware of the ability of news media to shape the national dialogue by focusing on subject matter that the ptb wishes to highlight in the public consciousness... we're also pretty much aware of how little context we get with most news stories where often critical background information is conveniently omitted that, if included, would give a story significantly deeper meaning... and we're also aware that key public figures will often make themselves available for interviews to news outlets when they are trying to soften the public up for an event or decision that might not sit well... rarely, however, do all of these come together in one article...

Ex-U.S. spy chief says may take crisis for new cyber law

U.S. intelligence agencies have unique capabilities that can help protect American companies from cyber espionage and attack, but it will probably take a crisis to change laws to allow that type of cooperation, a former spy chief said on Monday.

Intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency are authorized to operate abroad but generally are restricted from working within the United States,

"Until we have a banking collapse or electric power goes off in the middle of a snowstorm for eight weeks, or something of that magnitude, we're likely just to talk about it and not do much," Mike McConnell, former director of national intelligence, said.

[...]

The House intelligence committee in December approved a bill that would allow U.S. spy agencies to share cyber-threat intelligence with private companies. Some critics worry that could lead to government surveillance of private data.

[...]

"There are unique things that the government can do. For example code-breaking. The private sector out there does not do code-breaking," McConnell, a former National Security Agency director, told Reuters in an interview.

"How would you harness that capability and then make it available to the private sector in a way that their infrastructure could be better protected?"

[...]

McConnell gives an example that if NSA, which conducts electronic eavesdropping to detect foreign threats, observed a cyberthreat against the U.S. private sector, "NSA is powerless to do a thing other than issue a report."

He said in the area of cyber exploitation, such as reading an adversary's mail without leaving fingerprints, the United States, Britain and Russia are probably the best.

The United States also has the ability to conduct cyber attacks, which would be to degrade or destroy an adversary's computerized system, and has used it.

Has the United States used its cyber attack capability? "Yes," McConnell said. Did it work? "Yes."

McConnell, now vice chairman at the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm in charge of cyber activities, did not elaborate on the use of a cyber attack capability.

"Do we have the ability to attack, degrade or destroy? Sure. If you do that, what are the consequences? That is the question," he said.

McConnell said the priority is to protect the country's critical infrastructure such as the financial sector, the electric power grid and transportation from cyber attack and stop the theft of intellectual property through cyber espionage.

"There will be a thousand voices on what is the right thing to do," and it will probably require a crisis to reach consensus, he said.

i'll give credit where credit is due... at least they bothered to mention mcconnell's position with booz allen even if it took 'em 14 paragraphs to do it...

what might have been additional contextually significant information is that mcconnell is a poster child for the revolving door between top u.s. government posts and the corporations that feed off of government contracts... mcconnell served as senior vp for intelligence and national security at booz after retiring from the navy as nsa director and before being appointed as the director of national security by george bush and went immediately back to booz again as a senior vp seven days after the obama presidential inauguration and has since assumed the post of booz vice chairman (see here)...

other information about booz that would have been relevant is that booz is the 9th largest u.s. government contractor with annual revenues of over $5B, does an enormous amount of work with the u.s. government in the area of technology and cybersecurity, is majority owned by the carlyle group and has a strong profit motive to push an increase in government cyber capability by fronting a former dni who just so happens to be its current vice chairman (see here and here)...

now, what to make out of mcconnell's statement that "it will probably require a crisis"...? if there isn't one that occurs naturally and spontaneously, can we assume one will be created...? are we being tipped off...? does mcconnell know something we don't...? is it a veiled threat...?

why can't news organizations give us the information we need to make sense out of a story...? just because i happen to be a news junkie, i am aware of all this relevant background but why can't such information be a legitimate part of the news...? it would certainly help people discharge their responsibilities as informed citizens...

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Marcy says what needs to be said about the Very Scarey Iran Plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador

amazingly, there has not yet been a case submitted to a grand jury...

marcy - emptywheel - wheeler...

Our government has had eleven business days now to subject its amended case to the scrutiny of a grand jury, it had two and a half months to subject its original case to the scrutiny of a grand jury, and it hasn’t yet bothered to do so. We’re sharing our case with the rest of the world before we’re subjecting it to the most basic level of oversight enshrined in our Constitution. Instead of using the legal process laid out in our founding document, we’ve gotten the signature of a Magistrate Judge and run off with it to the rest of the world. And while I have no doubt of the competence of Magistrate Judge Michael Dolinger, the judge who signed the complaint in this case, that’s simply not the way our judicial system is supposed to work. Average citizens are supposed to review the work of the government when it makes legal cases, not just Magistrates.

All of which ought to raise real questions why our government has decided to share these details with the rest of the world, but bypassed the step where they’re supposed to share them with its own citizens.

how interesting that it takes a lone blogger to make the kind of substantial point that should have been a glaring omission to even the least perceptive of our so-called professional news media... if the case was worth the paper it's printed on, a grand jury indictment should have been a slam dunk and certainly something our fear-mongering leaders would have wanted to have had in hand before trying to put that horribly scarey country, iran, back on the front burner...

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Was Raymond Davis trying to ignite a false flag war to pre-empt the collapse of the global economy...?

if true, this could be one of the final nails in the coffin of the super-rich elite domination of global affairs and the beginning of the real changes i have been fervently praying for for so very, very long...

"CIA spy" Davis was giving nuclear bomb material to Al-Qaeda, says report

Double murder-accused US official Raymond Davis has been found in possession of top-secret CIA documents, which point to him or the feared American Task Force 373 (TF373) operating in the region, providing Al-Qaeda terrorists with "nuclear fissile material" and "biological agents," according to a report.

Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is warning that the situation on the sub-continent has turned "grave" as it appears that open warfare is about to break out between Pakistan and the United States, The European Union Times reports.

The SVR warned in its report that the apprehension of 36-year-old Davis, who shot dead two Pakistani men in Lahore last month, had fuelled this crisis.

According to the report, the combat skills exhibited by Davis, along with documentation taken from him after his arrest, prove that he is a member of US' TF373 black operations unit currently operating in the Afghan War Theatre and Pakistan's tribal areas, the paper said.

While the US insists that Davis is one of their diplomats, and the two men he killed were robbers, Pakistan says that the duo were ISI agents sent to follow him after it was discovered that he had been making contact with al Qaeda, after his cell phone was tracked to the Waziristan tribal area bordering Afghanistan, the paper said.

The most ominous point in this SVR report is "Pakistan's ISI stating that top-secret CIA documents found in Davis's possession point to his, and/or TF373, providing to al Qaeda terrorists "nuclear fissile material" and "biological agents", which they claim are to be used against the United States itself in order to ignite an all-out war in order to re-establish the West's hegemony over a Global economy that is warned is just months away from collapse," the paper added. [emphasis added]

then there's this from the asian tribune...

[H]ypocrisy in America is now so commonplace it is no longer noticed. While it enjoys torturing other peoples for American sins, it objects to human rights abuses of countries it despises such as Burma, Pakistan, Iran, Syria. In USA if a person tortures a dog he is sent to jail, but a government functionary indulging in torture against fellow beings is ignored.

[...]

America has provided licenses to kill to its soldiers and secret agents and desires Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq, the three most affected countries to grant full immunity to all US nationals. Musharraf regime as well as current regime had given their consent on the quiet but now that the ruling regime is in dire straits; and the Army and ISI have adopted principled stand on national security matters, the US is finding it difficult to have its own way and is off colors.

[...]

Detained Davis has become a ticking bomb for Pakistan. His safety till completion of his trial which will take a considerable length of time has become an utmost concern for law enforcement agencies in Lahore. There are possibilities he could be swooped away by the US Special Forces already secretly positioned in Pakistan through a sting operation. RAW could play a dirty role in harming him to put Pakistan in another tight corner. Fearful of Davis divulging CIA’s clandestine operations in Pakistan, the CIA could get him bumped off. Anti-American militant groups based in Pakistan may attempt to kill him in case they feel that he is being freed without a trial.

definitely worth keeping an eye on this developing story...

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Is Osama dead, alive or just a cardboard poster boy for endless war...?

i'm glad to see this possibility getting a little more traction in the traditional media, even if it IS the uk media... i have harbored a nagging suspicion for a very long time that the "war on terror" was a red herring, carefully crafted to keep us in a perpetual state of war... do ya s'pose that maybe, just maybe, some of the truth is starting to emerge...?

Undeterred, Barack Obama has launched a fresh operation to find him. Working with the Pakistani Army, elite squads of U.S. and British special forces were sent into Waziristan this summer to 'hunt and kill' the shadowy figure intelligence officers still call 'the principal target' of the war on terror.

This new offensive is, of course, based on the premise that the 9/11 terrorist is alive. After all, there are the plethora of 'Bin Laden tapes' to prove it.

Yet what if he isn't? What if he has been dead for years, and the British and U.S. intelligence services are actually playing a game of double bluff?

What if everything we have seen or heard of him on video and audio tapes since the early days after 9/11 is a fake - and that he is being kept 'alive' by the Western allies to stir up support for the war on terror?

Incredibly, this is the breathtaking theory that is gaining credence among political commentators, respected academics and even terror experts.

like i've repeatedly said, at this point in my advanced state of cynicism, i believe everything and i believe nothing...

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What could the plan be?

paul craig roberts via ich...

What could the plan be?

They can steal the election with the Diebold electronic voting machines and proprietary software that no one is allowed to check. There are now enough elections on record with significant divergences between exit polls and vote tallies that a stolen election can be explained away. The Democrats have been house trained to acquiesce to stolen elections. The voters, whose votes are stolen, dismiss the evidence as “conspiracy theories.”

Or what about a well-timed orchestrated “terrorist attack” to drive fearful Americans to the war candidate. False flag events are stock-in-trade. Hitler used the Reichstag fire to turn German democracy into a dictatorship overnight.

heightened vigilance is required... remember, we are the ones we have been waiting for...

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Our president is such a maroon,* but a dangerous one nonetheless

to me, this is simply a measure of the desperation of bush and his criminal compadres... their fear-mongering tactics are being greeted with eye-rolling and extended sighs at every turn, so they have to escalate, which, true to form, means playing fast and loose with the truth... it's the same dynamic you see with parents and their children when threats are used as a means to control behavior... unless threats are consistently carried out, they quickly become meaningless which leads to more and more dire threats which, of course, quickly become meaningless too...

Speaking to about 300 troops at Charleston Air Force Base, Bush said that Al Qaeda in Iraq was essentially the same organization that attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, and that it was by far the biggest threat facing Iraqis and U.S.-led coalition troops there. Bush said that its leaders took orders from Al Qaeda officials coordinating the organization's worldwide jihad, or holy war, and that they would be killing civilians somewhere else if they were not in Iraq.

"Those who justify withdrawing our troops from Iraq by denying the threat of Al Qaeda in Iraq and its ties to Osama bin Laden ignore the clear consequences of such a retreat," Bush said. "If we were to follow their advice, it would be dangerous for the world and disastrous for America.

"Here's the bottom line," he said. "Al Qaeda in Iraq is run by foreign leaders loyal to Osama bin Laden. Like Bin Laden, they are coldblooded killers who murder the innocent to achieve Al Qaeda's political objectives.

"Yet despite all the evidence, some will tell you that Al Qaeda in Iraq is not really Al Qaeda and not really a threat to America," the president continued. "Well, that's like watching a man walk into a bank with a mask and a gun and saying's he's probably just there to cash a check."

my concern with the daily escalation of threats like this is, as paul craig roberts recently warned, the compulsion to turn them into reality, as the final tactic in convincing us they're genuine, may eventually become too much to resist...

* Bugs Bunny

Whatta maroon! Whatta ignoranimus!

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USS Enterprise to be target of false flag operation?

here's something that hadn't crossed my mind... certainly i had thought of the possibility of a staged "incident" sparking a u.s. attack, but with the enterprise due to arrive in the gulf soon (earlier post here), this bears some consideration...

It was suggested a year ago, that the USS Enterprise was a likely “false flag” target to provide the Bush administration with an excuse to attack Iran. The ship’s last spell in the Gulf passed without incident (let’s hope it will again), but it is now returning to apparently replace the USS Nimitz.

The USS Enterprise is due to be decommissioned in 2014-2015 and is the oldest aircraft carrier in the fleet (launched in 1960), so one could say it is “expendable” on the grounds of age. But what other reasons are there to believe that a carrier might be a possible target for a “new” 9/11?

[...]

A great deal of pressure has been placed on Iran (because of its nuclear program etc) and it is often accused of having links with Al-Qaeda and supporting insurgents in Iraq, a view that the Bush administration would like the world to adopt. But after the lies told before the invasion of Iraq, something more convincing would be required before any action is taken against Iran.

The sinking of an old aircraft carrier (with a crew of 5,000) might be sufficient, especially if we are told that Iran “allegedly” had some involvement in it (maybe a missile attack?). But who could say for sure whether such a missile was launched from Iran, or some remote area in Iraq?

an "incident" of that magnitude, the sinking of an aircraft carrier and the incredible loss of life that would go with it, would surely fulfill the dire predictions of paul craig roberts... i'm sure it's also the wet dream of folks like santorum, cheney and chertoff... the country would descend into total and complete shock, the dogs of war would immediately be unleashed, and any skeptical or dissenting voices would be silenced and probably arrested for treason... just one more item to add to the list of horrifying possibilities posed by our criminal president and his compadres...

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Iran, the sacking of Peter Pace, nukes, unfettered presidential power, and martial law

i really need to stop reading paul craig roberts... he takes all the creepy-crawlies that start skittering around in my mind when i stand back and look at what is really happening and puts them in black and white...

(btw, not meaning to break my arm patting myself on the back, but i offered the very same rationale for pace's sacking back on june 9... i also posted on NSPD 51 and HSPD-20 back on may 20 and commented on how nicely they seem to fit with the martial law provision of Section 1076 of the Defense Authorization Act, another post i put up back on april 25...)

"It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral."

General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Press Club, February 17, 2006.

"They will be held accountable for the decisions they make. So they should in fact not obey the illegal and immoral orders to use weapons of mass destruction."

General Peter Pace, CNN With Wolf Blitzer, April 6, 2003

[...]

The Bush regime has concluded that a conventional attack on Iran would do no more than stir up a hornet's nest and release retaliatory actions that the US could not manage. The Bush regime is convinced that only nuclear weapons can bring the mullahs to heel.

The Bush regime's plan to attack Iran with nuclear weapons puts General Pace's departure in a different light. How can President Bush succeed with an order to attack with nuclear weapons when America's highest ranking military officer says that such an order is "illegal and immoral" and that everyone in the military has an "absolute responsibility" to disobey it?

An alternative explanation for Pace's departure is that Pace had to go so that malleable toadies can be installed in his place.

Pace's departure removes a known obstacle to a nuclear attack on Iran, thus advancing that possible course of action. A plan to attack Iran with nuclear weapons might also explain the otherwise inexplicable "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive" (NSPD-51 AND HSPD-20) that Bush issued on May 9. Bush's directive allows him to declare a "national emergency" on his authority alone without ratification by Congress. Once Bush declares a national emergency, he can take over all functions of government at every level, as well as private organizations and businesses, and remain in total control until he declares the emergency to be over.

Who among us would trust Bush, or any president, with this power? What is the necessity of such a sweeping directive subject to no check or ratification?

[...]

A speculative answer is that, with appropriate propaganda, the directive could be triggered by a US nuclear attack on Iran. The use of nuclear weapons arouses the ultimate fear. A US nuclear attack would send Russian and Chinese ICBMs into high alert. False flag operations could be staged in the US. The US media would hype such developments to the hilt, portraying danger everywhere. Fear of the regime's new detention centers would silence most voices of protest as the regime declares its "national emergency."

This might sound like a far-out fiction novel, but it is a scenario that would explain the Bush regime's lack concern that the shrinking Republican vote that foretells a massive Republican wipeout in the 2008 election. In a declared national emergency, there would be no election.

As implausible as this might sound to people who trust the government, be aware that despite his rhetoric, Bush has no respect for democracy. His neoconservative advisors have all been taught that it is their duty to circumvent democracy, as democracy does not produce the right decisions. Neoconservatives believe in rule by elites, and they regard themselves as the elite. The Bush regime decided that Americans would not agree to an invasion of Iraq unless they were deceived and tricked into it, and so we were.

[...]

Americans might have more awareness of their peril if they realized that their leaders no longer believe in democratic outcomes.

i really wish i didn't agree with him... the kind of scenario roberts spells out is PRECISELY the kind of scenario that nobody in this country chooses to see or, more accurately, hasn't paid close enough attention to to understand how carefully the stage has been set for it to play out... using roberts' term, the bush "regime" - precisely the correct word imho - is extraordinarily dangerous, not only for this country but also for the world... i think these criminals are both perfectly capable and perfectly willing to carry out such a catastrophic plan... i would sincerely hope, however, that prior to its execution, the enormity of it would leak out and inspire our somnolent populace to finally undertake to throw the bastards out so we can start with the hard work of getting our country back...

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