A few months before Osama bin Laden’s death, Web sites linked to al-Qaeda ran excited commentary about a proposed new killing machine dubbed the “human lawn mower.” The idea was to attach rotating blades to the front of a pickup truck and drive the contraption into crowds.While some jihadists admired the idea, one graying veteran of the terrorist movement took a stand against it. That was bin Laden himself, by then living out his twilight years in a Pakistani villa with ample time to think about his legacy. The man who famously ordered jetliners flown into skyscrapers drew the line at cutting down humans like weeds.Read full article (two screens).
Phi Beta Iota: Now that Ignatius and Pincus have set the stage, it appears CIA is turning to naive journalists to take the Bin Laden Show on the road — people who know nothing and question nothing. What we will NOT see is actual document being provided, especially documents in perfect Arabic to Arab journalists. There is a great deal about all of this that reeks of a massive illegal covert action against the US public, but with Dick Cheney setting the gold standard at 935 documented lies, we should not expect the truth anytime soon. We continue to believe that Bin Laden died in 2001; that a patsy was set up by Blackwater and CIA, and that JSOG was unwitting (and unquestioning) in its role as “backdrop” to the story. It is very unlikely that all of these documents exist or are authentic–it is more probable that a propaganda story line has been developed, with a domestic audience in mind, and this will be doled out to corrupt and unwitting journalists across the USA between now and November 2012. Yuk.
The question is an absurd one except to those of us who have spent part of our lives exploring contradictions and mysteries posed by official narratives regarding events of that world-changing day. Increasingly, the question is becoming, “How many real persons died as a result of alleged events that occurred in connection with the destruction of buildings in New York City’s World Trade Center Complex on September 11, 2001?”
A logical tentative answer is provided by Mr. Simon Shack, the brilliant creator of SeptemberClues.info web site and supported by members of his CluesForum.info, two online resources that call into serious question reports of that day’s victims.
Shack’s sites initially postulated all alleged victims to be computer created fakes who never existed, based on absurdities of photoshopped and digitally morphed memorial images. Proofs presented on their Vicsim Report are overwhelmingly convincing when one takes sufficient time to carefully review its eighty pages.
Phi Beta Iota: There are three lines of thinking emergent on 9/11 that are gathering some momentum. The first is that the mainstream media were fully engaged in showing manipulated video enhanced with some computer simulation — this has not been investigated to our knowledge. The second is that the body count for 9/11 was fabricated. We would add the likelihood that the same force that pulverized all the concrete was also responsible for pulverizing most of the bodies within the buildings. The third, the most interesting, has actually begun to connect the dots among all the Zionists in NYC and neo-cons in Washington, D.C. We have no direct knowledge. We only know that the truth of the matter remains to be found.
An Army field manual published last week explains the Army's conduct of information collection activities in military operations.
“In this manual, the term ‘information collection' is introduced as the Army's replacement for ‘intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance' (also known as ISR),” the manual says.
“This publication clarifies how the Army plans, prepares, and executes information collection activities within or between echelons.”
“As the Army fields new formations and equipment with inherent and organic information collection capabilities, it needs a doctrinal foundation to ensure their proper integration and use to maximize their capabilities.”
Sibel Edmonds' new book, Classified Woman, is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.
The experiences she recounts resemble K.'s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.
I've read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as “page-turners” and “gripping dramas,” but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now.
The F.B.I., the Justice Department, the White House, the Congress, the courts, the media, and the nonprofit industrial complex put Sibel Edmonds through hell. This book is her triumph over it all, and part of her contribution toward fixing the problems she uncovered and lived through.
Edmonds took a job as a translator at the FBI shortly after 9-11. She considered it her duty. Her goal was to prevent any more terrorist attacks. That's where her thinking was at the time, although it has now changed dramatically. It's rarely the people who sign up for a paycheck and healthcare who end up resisting or blowing a whistle.
Edmonds found at the FBI translation unit almost entirely two types of people. The first group was corrupt sociopaths, foreign spies, cheats and schemers indifferent to or working against U.S. national security. The second group was fearful bureaucrats unwilling to make waves. The ordinary competent person with good intentions who risks their job to “say something if you see something” is the rarest commodity. Hence the elite category that Edmonds found herself almost alone in: whistleblowers.
Over the last few months I’ve noticed an annoying trend on various web sites, generally major newspaper and magazine sites, but also certain weblogs. What happens is that when you select text from these web pages, the site uses JavaScript to report what you’ve copied to an analytics server and append an attribution URL to the text. So, for example, if I were using this “service” here on Daring Fireball, and you selected the first sentence of this article, copied it, then switched to another app to paste the text you just copied, instead of pasting just the sentence you selected and intended to copy, you’d instead get:
Over the last few months I’ve noticed an annoying trend on various web sites, generally major newspaper and magazine sites, but also certain weblogs.
I.e., three blank lines followed by “Read more:”, then the URL from which the text was copied, then an identifying hash code used for tracking purposes.
Among the sites where I’ve seen this in use are TechCrunch (example) and The New Yorker (example). The JavaScript tomfoolery happens with most text copied from the site — whether you’re copying the entire article, a paragraph, or a sentence.
Phi Beta Iota: Although “corruption” can certainly include “idiocy” we felt it appropriate to recognize Tynt — and the morons that let them corrupt web sites — with a special new category — Idiocy. Tip of the Hat to Mario Profaca for flagging, and Daring Fireball for putting into words — and providing code solutions –a public service.
