Yemenis Not Falling for It

[AlicetheKurious]

Yemen’s Drive on Al Qaeda Faces Internal Skepticism
By MONA EL-NAGGAR and ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: November 3, 2010

SANA, Yemen — As Yemen intensifies its military campaign against Al Qaeda’s regional arm, it faces a serious obstacle: most Yemenis consider the group a myth, or a ploy by their president to squeeze the West for aid money and punish his domestic opponents.

Those cynical attitudes — rooted in Yemen’s history of manipulative politics — complicate any effort to track down the perpetrators of the recent plot to send explosives by courier to the United States. They also make it harder to win public support for the fight against jihadist violence, whatever label one attaches to it.

“What is Al Qaeda? The truth is there is no Al Qaeda,” said Lutfi Muhammad, a weary-looking unemployed 50-year-old walking through this city’s tumultuous Tahrir Square. Instead, he said, the violence is “because of the regime and the lack of stability and the internal struggles.”

That view, echoed across Yemen, is only partly a conspiracy theory. The Yemeni government has used jihadists as proxy soldiers in the past, and sometimes conflates the Qaeda threat and the unrelated political insurgencies it has fought in northern and southern Yemen in recent years. In a country where political and tribal violence is endemic, it is often impossible to tell who is killing whom, and why.

One thing is clear: Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has stepped up his commitment to fighting Al Qaeda in the past year, with far more military raids and airstrikes, including some carried out by the American military. His government has paid a price. On Saturday, a day after the discovery of the air freight bomb plot, Mr. Saleh said during a news conference that Al Qaeda had killed 70 police officers and soldiers in the past four weeks. That is a sharp increase over previous years, and some analysts have taken it as proof that Al Qaeda’s Yemen-based branch is growing.

But many Yemenis seem doubtful that Al Qaeda was guilty in all or even most of those killings, which took place in the same southern parts of the country where a secessionist movement has been growing for the past three years.

“We cannot differentiate between what is propaganda and what is real,” said Abdullah al-Faqih, a professor of political science at Sana University. “It’s impossible to tell who is killing who; you have tribal feuds, Al Qaeda and the Southern Movement, and the state is doing a lot of manipulation.”

In a sense, there are two narratives about Al Qaeda in Yemen. One of them, presented by both the Yemeni government and Al Qaeda’s Internet postings (I think they mean the internet postings "found" by SITE and other Mossad fronts -- Alice) — and echoed in the West — portrays a black-and-white struggle between the groups. The other narrative is the view from the ground in Yemen: a confusing welter of attacks by armed groups with shifting loyalties, some fighting under political or religious banners, some merely looking for money.

The Yemeni authorities have long paid tribal leaders to fight domestic enemies, or even other tribes that were causing trouble for the government. That policy has helped foster a culture of blackmail: some tribal figures promote violence, whether through jihadists or mere criminals, and then offer to quell it in exchange for cash.

“Some of what looks like Al Qaeda is really terror as a business,” Mr. Faqih said.

Yemen’s tribes are often cast as the chief obstacle in the fight against Al Qaeda, sheltering the militants because of tribal hospitality or even ideological kinship. In fact, few tribal leaders have any sympathy for the group, and some tribes have forced Qaeda members to leave their areas in the past year.

In a statement released Tuesday, a group identifying itself as Al Qaeda members from the Awlaq tribe — one of Yemen’s largest — pleaded with their fellow tribesmen for support, noting that “we were deeply saddened to see the leaders, chiefs, and dignitaries of our community go personally to meet with the government envoy.”

Instead, Al Qaeda seems to thrive where tribal authority has eroded, or in the southern areas where hatred of the government is most intense. In many of the recent attacks, it is difficult to draw a line between Al Qaeda and angry, impoverished young men who have easy access to weapons.

This is particularly true of the secessionist movement in the south. “There are many unemployed young men and people with personal interests who rebelled against the state and against the movement itself,” said Saleh al-Hanashi, an adviser to the governor of Abyan, a southern province where the protest movement thrives and many of the recent killings have taken place. “They became these chaos-inciting groups. And these groups now in Abyan shoot at cars belonging to the state and do other destructive acts against the state.” This kind of vandalism is easily attributed to Al Qaeda, whether the group claims responsibility for it or not. The latest issue of the group’s English-language magazine, Inspire, features a banner headline on the front cover: “Photos From the Operations of Abyan.” Inside, there are gruesome pictures of burning Jeeps and dead Yemeni soldiers.

Many southerners view Mr. Saleh’s government as an occupying force, and while the secessionist movement’s leaders say they reject violence, some of its members may be willing to make common cause with jihadists. North and south Yemen, once separate countries, unified in 1990, then fought a bitter civil war four years later. Many in the south say they have been treated unequally ever since.

It is possible that the worsening carnage in southern Yemen, and Al Qaeda’s claims of responsibility for it, will eventually lead to a shift in perceptions and broader support for the government’s agenda. That is what happened in Saudi Arabia, where attitudes toward Al Qaeda were similar to those in Yemen until the group began carrying out bloody attacks in Saudi cities in 2003. Public opinion soon swung sharply against the jihadists, and by 2006 the Saudis had crushed the group.

That is far less likely in Yemen, with its terrible poverty and weak central government. For now, most Yemenis seem to dismiss reports of Al Qaeda killings as a “masrah,” or drama ("masrah" literally means "theater" -- Alice), staged by the government and its American backers. The suspicion runs so deep that any action by the Yemeni government seems to confirm it: counterterrorist raids are often described as punitive measures against domestic foes, and the failure to act decisively is derided as collusion.

“This latest episode with the packages is only making it worse,” said Mr. Faqih, the Sana University professor. “Many people think it was all about the elections in the U.S., or an excuse for American military intervention here.”

Mona El-Naggar reported from Sana, and Robert F. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon. Link

Great comments at the Information Clearing House website; I liked this one, by Infidel Castro:

"most Yemenis consider the group a myth"

Yeah, well what do they know? They only live there. They should read the New York Times more often so they'll have a better understanding of what's going on in their country.

[JackRiddler]

Inevitably:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/11 ... bs.html?hp
(all material quoted here as fair use, totally non-commercial, for purposes of education and debate, etc.)

Al Qaeda Group Says It Was Behind Plot

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 5, 2010
Filed at 6:20 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Yemen-based al-Qaida group is claiming responsibility for the international mail bomb plot uncovered late last week as well as the crash of a United Parcel Service cargo plane in September.

A week after authorities intercepted packages in Dubai and England that were bound for the U.S., Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula issued a message Friday saying it will continue to strike American and Western interests. They specifically said they would target civilian and cargo aircraft.

U.S. officials have said all week that there were strong indications the plot originated with AQAP, a terror group that has been gathering strength and increasingly triggering attacks on Western targets.

Authorities have said the September UPS crash was caused by an onboard fire, but investigators are taking another look at the incident.

U.S. intelligence experts will be examining the message from AQAP to try to verify its authenticity, said a U.S. intelligence official, adding that they are not surprised to see this claim now.

Neither am I. Lead with a declarative, save the followup on the verify for St. Neversday.

On Friday, a U.S. counterterrorism official separately said the Yemen group remains a serious threat. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters.

A security official in the UAE familiar with the investigations into the Sept. 3 crash of a UPS cargo plane in Dubai and the mail bombs plot told The Associated Press Friday that there is no change in earlier findings that the UPS crash in September was likely caused by an onboard fire and not by an explosive device.

There was no explosion, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity under standing UAE rules on disclosing security-related information.

A UPS spokesman, Norman Black, said his company had "no independent knowledge of this claim by al-Qaida," and noted that both UAE officials and U.S. National Transportation Safety Board officials have so far ruled out the possibility of a bomb as cause in the crash.

According to an AP translation of the terror group's statement, AQAP said that its "advanced explosives give us the opportunity to detonate (planes) in the air or after they have reached their final target, and they are designed to bypass all detection devices."

Both mail bombs were hidden inside computer printers and wired to detonators that used cell-phone technology and packed powdered PETN, a potent industrial explosive.

"We have struck three blows at your airplanes in a single year. And God willing, we will continue to strike our blows against American interests and the interests of America's allies," the terror group said.

The AQAP message also directed a warning to Saudi Arabia, which was instrumental in passing along the key tip that led to the discovery of the bombs: "These explosives were directed at Jewish Zionist temples, and you intervened to protect them with your treason. God's curse on the oppressors."

The claim was also translated by private SITE Intelligence Group. According to SITE, the message was posted on jihadist forums at 2:24 p.m. EDT.

"AQAP continues to probe for weaknesses in our ability to disrupt, detect or stop their operations," said Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who serves on the House intelligence terrorism subcommittee.

He expressed little surprise at the claim, saying:

"They are agile and determined. So must we be."

____

Associated Press writers Brian Murphy in Dubai, Samantha Bomkamp in New York City and Eileen Sullivan, Adam Goldman and Kimberly Dozier in Washington contributed to this report.

http://counterpunch.org/leupp11052010.html

November 5 - 7, 2010
More Questions Than Answers
The Yemeni Toner Cartridge Bomb Story

By GARY LEUPP

Jeff Huber on Antiwar.com wrote Monday about the Yemeni toner cartridge bomb story: “…if there’s a single substantiated syllable in that entire narrative, I have yet to encounter it in the New York Times. In a series of articles from 29, 30, and 31 October, our newspaper of tarnished record created enough cognitive dissonance to drive the Dalai Lama to a therapist’s couch.” I think that a bit of an exaggeration, but what have the NYT and other mainstream press organs told us?

On Thursday, Oct. 28, intelligence officials in Saudi Arabia informed U.S. intelligence officials that UPS and FedEx packages carrying explosives had been mailed from Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, to Chicago via two airplanes. They provided the tracking numbers. (It was later revealed that they acted on a tip from a former member of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP. He was subsequently identified by AP as Jabir al-Fayti, a Saudi national.) The UPS cargo plane stopped in Qatar, then Dubai, where local officials quickly discovered the device inside a Hewett-Packard printer. The FedEx cargo plane stopped at East Midlands Airport in England, where the other bomb was found. At 10:45 President Obama was briefed about the situation.

On Friday, cargo planes arriving in Philadelphia and Newark were searched, and in Brooklyn a UPS truck was stopped and inspected. No bombs or explosives were found. Meanwhile U.S. and Canadian fighter jets accompanied a passenger flight from the United Arab Emirates to New York, where the aircraft was searched. Nothing suspicious was found here either.

In the afternoon Obama made a statement from the White House, praising U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials and declaring, “The events of the past 24 hours underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism. The American people should be confidant that we will not waver in our resolve to defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to root out violent extremism in all its forms.” He added that the packages had been mailed to “specifically two places of Jewish worship in Chicago.”

That night, according to the Chicago Tribune, the congregation of Or Chadash, a synagogue in the Edgewater neighborhood, was informed by its rabbi that “a reliable and well-placed Jewish community source” had reported that Or Chadash had been one of the targets. However, the newspaper also reported that “a source close to the investigation” had stated that the packages were addressed to synagogues in East Rogers Park and Lake View neighborhoods.

Subsequent reports suggested that a small (100 member) lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender congregation called Or Chadash, which shares the Emmanuel synagogue in Lake View, was a target rather than the Edgewater synagogue.

On Friday the NYT also reported that U.S. officials felt that “evidence is mounting” that AQAP including New Mexico-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki were involved in the plot. They said they were “operating on the assumption” that AQAP bomb-maker Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri had produced the bombs. (They had concluded he was also responsible for the explosives that “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed to detonate on the Northwest Airlines plane over Detroit last Christmas Day.) The argument was apparently based on the fact that the packages contained pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) such as the underwear bomber had carried. But “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid also attempted to blow up a passenger plane in December 2001 using PETN, and he had no connection to Yemen or al-Asiri. He received training in Afghanistan, which al-Asiri has apparently never visited.
John O’Brennan, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor, stated that investigators didn’t yet know how the explosives were supposed to be activated. “[T]here’s some question,” writes Huber, “not only as to whether al-Qaeda was behind the attempted airplane bombings, but as to whether any actual bombs were involved. The bomb they found in or around the plane in Dubai was similar to the package found in England, but maybe the package found in England wasn’t actually a bomb.”

On Saturday officials including Brennan praised the Saudi and Yemeni governments for their cooperation while Yemeni officials acting on a tip from U.S. officials arrested a woman suspected of delivering the packages to UPS and FedEx in Sana’a. The Department of Homeland Security dispatched a cable indicating that the packages may have been connected to the “Yemen-American Institute for Language-Computer Management” and the “American Center for Training” in Sana’a. The same day the Emmanuel synagogue rabbi told CNN that a Chicago Jewish source “well-connected to the authorities” had told him that his congregation hadn’t really been a target. (Are we then supposed to believe that the plan was to bomb the building only when the Or Chadash LGPT folks were using it?)

Meanwhile both British Home Minister Theresa May and Prime Minister David Cameron opined that the device on the plane that had arrived at the East Midlands Airport was designed to explode while the plane was flying. Brennen then stated during an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday morning: “At this point we, I think, would agree with the British that it looks as though they were designed to be detonated in flight.” In other words, they weren’t targeting “two places of Jewish worship in Chicago” but cargo planes.

On Tuesday Nov. 2 Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane of the NYT reported that the packages had been addressed to “Diego Deza” and “Reynald Krak.” The former was a notorious Grand Inquisitor during the Spanish Inquisition of the sixteenth century, who tortured people accused of being secret Muslims. The latter name is a rare variant of Raynald of Chatillon, a French knight who slaughtered Muslims en route to Mecca as pilgrims during the Second Crusade in the twelfth century. (The chivalrous Muslim commander Saladin personally beheaded him as punishment.) The journalists called it a “sardonic choice” to include these “two dark inside jokes.”

But this raises the question of why AQAP would address the packages designed to explode in flight bringing down cargo planes to two Chicago synagogues under the names of two notorious enemies of Islam. Wouldn’t a package from Yemen, an unstable country intermittently targeted by U.S. drone-fired missiles, home of a group identified by U.S. officials as the greatest threat to U.S. security outside the “Af-Pak” border region, a country with only a handful of aging Jews, addressed to U.S. synagogues under the names chosen risk arousing suspicion? Wouldn’t the packages just be crying out, “Inspect me!”? If they were supposed to explode in flight anyway, wouldn’t it have made more sense to address them to some random street address under random names?

But let’s say packages were delivered to the two synagogues in Chicago, and did some damage. How would that help AQAP? Perhaps the cultural proclivity to demand “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” following the significant civilian death toll due to drone attacks might motivate this sort of response, especially given AQAP’s assumption that Jews direct U.S. foreign policy. But the organization surely knows that the powerful Israeli Lobby would suddenly press for more U.S. action in and against Yemen. Is that what it wants, to make Yemen another Afghanistan? It is possible that such a scenario fits in with a strategy of clearly pitting Islam against the west, and perhaps they figure that they could rally local support in the wake of a U.S. assault. But that is not at all clear at this point.

The involvement of al-Asiri seems taken for granted. But the underwear bomber’s device he is alleged to have designed was described by the world press as “crude,” and his effort to assassinate the Saudi counter-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in August 2009 was both crude and botched. (His suicide-bomber younger brother Abdullah, armed with three ounces of PETN in his anus---or some say, in his underwear---succeeded in blowing himself in half but only lightly injuring the prince.) Yet unnamed officials quoted in the Sunday NYT stated those on the cargo planes were “expertly constructed and unusually sophisticated.” The Christian Science Monitor reports that officials think them “a big step up from two previous international bombing attempts” involving al-Asiri. How has the 28 year old King Saud University chemistry-major dropout hiding out somewhere in East Yemen so substantially honed his bomb making skills in the last 10 months?

And what about this Jabir al-Fayti? He’d had been captured in Afghanistan by U.S. forces, held at Guantanamo to 2007, released into Saudi custody where he completed a rehabilitation program, upon release joined AQAP in Yemen, then left AQAP to gave himself up to Saudi authorities last September. They sent a private jet to Sana’a to pick him up, according to AP. You have to wonder who he’s really working for. The Saudis are known to be trying to infiltrate AQAP. The Saudis fear and detest AQAP and join with the U.S. in urging Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh, beleaguered by two regional insurgencies more important to him than the two or three hundred AQAP militants in his country, to take firmer action against the small group. Might they wish to create an incident that would encourage Obama to strike harder at Yemen?

How did the Saudis get the tracking numbers so quickly? Did al-Fayti supply them? Or the name of the woman who had sent them? Or did he know the addresses and names of the addressees?

What about the arrested woman? Hanan al-Samawi is a 22 year old engineering student at Sana’a University who enjoys Western music and reads popular Western books. Detained Saturday on “a U.S. tip” she was released the following day when Yemeni police determined that someone had stolen her identity. Perhaps the real sender will never be known. What of the two language schools in Sana’a that Homeland Security was connecting to al-Qaeda? On Monday, Nov. 1, the NYT indicated that neither institution seems to exist. There’s a U.S. State Department-run Yemen American Language Institute but its director said Monday that it never uses UPS or FedEx.

What is AQAP saying about all this? So far, nothing. That doesn’t mean it isn’t responsible; AQAP only took credit for a Sept. 25 attack on a security bus in Yemen two weeks later (on Oct. 9). But three days after the underwear bomber incident last year the group released a message claiming responsibility. A full week has gone by with no claim of responsibility by AQAP for the toner cartridge explosives.

What of the official security threat assessment? Homeland Security has pointedly avoided upping the color-coded “threat level” even as it warns of the need for greater cargo plane inspection. But the Defense Department mulls more drone attacks and the dispatch of what the Wall Street Journal recently termed “U.S. elite hunter-killer teams” controlled by the CIA on the ground in Yemen. All such measures could be justified as a prudent response to the aborted attacks. They have other uses too, such as making Obama look strong and efficient a couple days before the mid-term elections.

The incident strengthens and encourages all manner of war-mongers. The Weekly Standard’s Thomas Jocelyn manages to argue that this episode proves that U.S. torture of detainees at Guantanamo (including Yemenis, who have made up the largest group since January 2008) isn’t the “driving force behind AQAP’s terror” but rather “the terrorists’ jihadist ideology, which the Obama administration spends much of its time ignoring.” (So why worry about provoking ordinary Yemenis with drone missile attacks and the abuse of their countrymen when the underlying cause for hatred of the U.S. is Islamist “jihadism” from Afghanistan to Somalia?)

Liz Cheney, deputy secretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs under the Bush/Cheney administration, appeared on Fox News to argue that al-Qaeda was probing “the weakest spot in our system” by targeting cargo planes and that “that’s why intelligence becomes so important. It’s why I believe that the steps that this president has taken, for example, threatening to prosecute intelligence officials, are so dangerous and damaging for the nation. It’s why the Wikileaks, the leaks are so damaging.”

Cognitive dissonance aside, the reportage on this episode has been fraught with contradictions, leaves many unanswered questions, and serves the interests of those bent on perpetuating and expanding wars based on lies and fear.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

[justdrew]

so... after nearly ten years of virtually nothing, the dreaded terrorists finally hit on a sure thing... MAIL THE BOMBS!

and it woulda worked too if it not for that one guy who'd been Guantanamo'd being:
a. let in on the details by the terrorists (great security there) even though there's no reason to
b. said Guantanamo'd man decided he actually doesn't want to see anything get blown up anymore, and calls his friendly neighborhood Saudi security goons to report the plot.

Did B occur immediately after the Guantanamo'd Man finished building and mailing the bombs by any chance?

[JackRiddler]

.

The usual way is to have the informant find the patsies, suggest the plot, set them up with explosives and then drop the dime. Trials to follow. I think in this case they (operationally, presumably the Saudi intelligence) don't want no patsies, just useful ghosts to have the Americans shoot at. So they send the bombs themselves, drop the dime, and watch the "investigative" agencies and media reliably construct the "al Qaeda" part.

Mail bomb. An explosive stocked by every military in the world. "All the hallmarks."

And voila, SITE discovers. On the jihadi sites, to which the links are never given. (We don't want to help em get hits, right?) Statement soon to be authenticated.

Haver you ever read a follow-up on one of these authentications? Seriously. "The FBI today completed its exhaustive study and announced it had authenticated blah blah." This part never has to be bothered with. Other news swill keeps washing in. When the next terror moment comes, this incident will already be part of the canon of past "al Qaeda" actions that prove their perfidy.

.

[semper occultus]

Cargo plane bomb plot: Yemen doubts its link to the plot

www.telegraph.co.uk Published: 7:30AM BST 30 Oct 2010

The government of Yemen has expressed astonishment at the cargo plane bomb plots, claiming there were no UPS cargo planes that had taken off from Yemen on Friday or any indirect or direct flights to British or American airports.

In a statement distributed to journalists and posted on the official website, the statement warned against "rush decisions in a case as sensitive as this one and before investigations reveal the truth".

The government also promised an investigation into allegations that the packages had originated in Yemen.

"We are working closely with international partners – including the US – on the incident," the statement said.

British and Dubai authorities stated that the two packages found on cargo jets originated from Yemen carried by FedEx and UPS parcel services.

The discovery of the packages has once more put the spotlight on Yemen and the growth of the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula militant group.

The group previously has planned attacks on commercial US-bound flights and had a role in mass shootings in several American cities.

In the past 18 months, the al-Qaida offshoot in Yemen has grown stronger, and its members have been implicated in several plots against US targets, including the futile attack last Dec 25 on an airliner landing in Detroit, Michigan.

[Wombaticus Rex]

On a positive note:

When the first round of "package bombs" happened, it came up in one of the call centers I was working in. I didn't say a word throughout what I'm about to relate, just listened. A young lady brought up the headline, she was alarmed. Immediately two older dudes scoffed and said the whole thing was fake. An even older lady interjected that it was "election season" and "they're always cooking something up this time of year." The conversation continued along those lines for about a minute, several other people joined in, nobody in the room spoke up for the story being remotely real or true. It was nice.

[AlicetheKurious]

Excerpts from:

GORDON DUFF: BOMBS, TERRORISM AND MANURE

October 31, 2010 by Gordon Duff



BOMB DETECTION MYTHOLOGY

Every newspaper in the country has reported that PETN, Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is “undetectable.” Look at the word. See the part that says “nitrate?” Most common explosives are nitrates and there is nothing the least bit difficult about finding them. The game is simple. We now have to put a useless $5 million dollar “Michael Chertoff” package scanner in every post office in America to find explosives easily detected by 1970s technology. This is the heart of mythology and the racketeers that run, not only “counter-terrorism” but may well in fact run “terrorism” as well.

30 years ago, I was talking with my good friend Leo Crampsey about portable explosive detectors. Those of you who know Leo, know him as the “last man” up the ladder in 1975, last American to leave the embassy in Saigon as South Vietnam fell to the communists.

We had gotten a new British model, one extremely effective at detecting nitrate based explosives like PETN. It was very portable, rechargeable battery, and a good application for use by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

Letter bombs had become a big issue and inspecting mail received by the president while traveling became the first application.

This much can probably be said, considering the years that have passed.

Suffice it to say, I have been around these technologies and “counter-terrorism” for awhile and recognize the smell of “manure” in today’s press stories.

“Counter-terrorism” was a science long before 9/11 and the people of the United States had been looked after quite effectively for some time, before terrorism became an industry onto itself.

PETN is interesting stuff. It is actually a heart drug. There are more than a few ways to detect it, certainly those airport swabs can pick it up, sniffers and the newer scanners. It doesn’t hold together well so you can’t shape it as with other explosives unless you mix it with something else. It also requires a trigger of some kind, another explosive device, something that makes it even easier to detect. Ah, but the press doesn’t care about any of this, they are willing to fabricate stories about the new “magic” undetectable explosive, one that requires that airports, post offices, courier companies, all buy new inspection equipment.

Former head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, represents many of the companies that make this extremely expensive equipment. Do we want to say who owns these companies? This, and a few things about Chertoff leap out at us in a second. Never was America, its freedoms and security less free and less secure as when Michael Chertoff was watching over us.

The smell we get is “false flag.” Link

[AhabsOtherLeg]

According to the French Interior Minister, the bomb intercepted at the airport in the East Midlands was ‘defused only 17 minutes before the moment it was set to explode’.

Al Qaeda planners believed the plane carrying it would have been over the Atlantic or the U.S. mainland when it was primed to go off in a Lockerbie-style attack.

But the plane made an unscheduled refuelling stop at East Midlands Airport because of the weight of its cargo. Such was the expertise of the bombmaker and the sophistication of the device that it took a bomb disposal expert seven attempts to establish that it was viable and defuse it.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1326552/Yemen-ink-bomb-defused-17-minutes-spare-Device-ready-explode.html

Seven attempts to establish it was viable, eh? And then they could move on to defusing it? FFS.

And these bombs, scheduled to explode mid-atlantic, were adressed to "religious institutions" in Chicago - Synagogues, as everybody instantly guessed - for what particular reason? Teh lulz? To make them easier to trace? If they were intended to vapourize a plane's fuselage over the Atlantic, why use such obviously red-flag addresses?

I suppose it's possible that they thought it wouldn't matter anyway.

Aye... Al Qaeda thought that a large, bulky package sent from Yemen, addressed to a Synagogue in the United States, would not come under any special scrutiny...

The artillery and explosives guys over on the British Army Rumour Service forums - affectionately known as A.R.R.S.E - were having a good laugh not long ago about the picture of the original bomb. I can only paraphrase now, but one guy described it as "Like a bombmaker's son's first attempt." It looked to be made out of a squeezy bottle and some gaffer tape. Now, though, we have a sophisticated attempt using a huge amount of explosive packed into a printer that looks like it weighs a ton on it's own.

I realise there were two separate bombs - maybe one was quite pro, and the other one was pathetic (the first one we got to see, which was not much to look at even to my eyes). But that's not the story that's coming out now. Now they were both extremely viable.

I won't use the names of folk who're talking over on A.R.R.S.E. (because it wouldn't be right) but there are some very interesting comments from our brothers in arms over there. They don't buy it either.

"A lame attempt at admitting the sequence of events without admitting a fcuk up. Still, the experience should sharpen up their procedures and thinking.

A shitpence printer being sent half way around the world? The freight charges would have been in excess of the cost of a new one. If the contents can be identified, the default position should be;

save your money, take your printer home and tell your friend in Chicago that for much cheapness he can buy a new one. Bloke fcuks off, call made to police, bloke gets talked to nicely by local police, dawn raids follow.

One hole in cargo security plugged."

Ah, now I must admit, this one makes a lot more sense than the "17 minutes till explosion" rubbish:

I have not heard any technical details since a breakfast Radio 4 interview this morning that made this point. When shipping cargo the bomber has no idea of where the device is as it may take 3 planes or 6 planes to get to final destination.

This seemed to hint that a sending device to tell someone its location is not very stealthy if you want the bomb to remain hidden.

Logically an altimeter arming device could not work on its own as stated above it may go up and down 3 times or 6 times etc.
Therefore for it to go off in the air the device must have been smart enough to know how high it was and have GPS to know where it was i.e.UK or US airspace.

My shot in the dark is the bomb was meant for the addressed Jewish Community and would have detonated on hook up to power supply and not as suggested for the plane.

Just a suggestion.

Looking at the pictures of the printer, and how it's (apparently) packed with the explosive, that guy's suggestion seems much more likely to me than the "official story" - they don't even seem to have an official story yet. The only thing I can be certain of is that the French Interior Minister was deliberately talking out of his arse, like Sarkozy before him.

The "plug-in" bomb is certainly more likely than somebody sending a timed bomb from Yemen, in the sheer random hope that it will arrive at a particular Chicago synagogue before it explodes. They're not quite that dumb, unfortunately. If only they were.

[Nordic]

Good link, Alice.

[82_28]

I can say this, NPR, NBC et al were banging the Yemen drum pretty damned loud yesterday. Talk of it's poverty, cut to a bunch of dudes in the back of a truck with weapons in air, a kid and a mom toiling near some river, show some mullah or something talking and gesticulating with one finger in the air, show "archive footage" of terrorist training camps, then move onto the CAT scan lung cancer thing, bring in expert about that, talk about it some and then go to commercial.

They're getting "Yemen" out there into the subconscious. The Christmas commercials and songs are now also in full swing.

When the fuck will we throw this manipulation all off? All of it! When? I feel like a motherfucking zombie all fucking year just going from one ride to the next, all capitalist holidays, all of them expecting something out of me. You BBQ this day, you watch fireworks on this one, you spend a grand for this which you place under a tree, you have people over and pray and eat for that, there's a sale on this one, you take your lady out on another, you get really drunk and party for a couple, you get really somber and reflect on the saviors resurrection and hunt pastel eggs for yet one more -- you name it. Pure manipulation.

http://movieclips.com/vDQr-brazil-movie ... r-husband/

[Nordic]

Well more and more people aren't falling for it. I've actually been pretty shocked lately, in my latest swimming through the hoards, at how few people are swallowing the "official" bullshit.

Yet the bullshitters are either completely unaware, or just don't care, and keep producing their artificial version of reality, for their paper-trail excuse to commit evil.

We're not stopping them, so why should they change?

[AlicetheKurious]

IS ISRAEL CONTROLLING PHONY TERROR NEWS?

Posted on 31. Dec, 2009 by Editor in Health and Medicine

Who says Al Qaeda takes credit for a bombing? Rita Katz. Who gets us bin Laden tapes? Rita Katz. Who gets us pretty much all information telling us Muslims are bad? Rita Katz? Rita Katz is the Director of Site Intelligence, primary source for intelligence used by news services, Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA. What is her qualification? She served in the Israeli Defense Force. She has a college degree and most investigative journalists believe the Mossad "helps" her with her information. We find no evidence of any qualification whatsoever of any kind. A bartender has more intelligence gathering experience.

Nobody verifies her claims. SITE says Al Qaeda did it, it hits the papers. SITE says Israel didn’t do it, that hits the papers too. What does SITE really do? They check the internet for "information," almost invariably information that Israel wants reported and it is sold as news, seen on American TV, reported in our papers and passed around the internet almost as though it were actually true. Amazing.

Do we know if the information reported comes from a teenager in Seattle or a terror cell in Jakarta? No, of course not, we don’t have a clue. Can you imagine buying information on Islamic terrorism from an Israeli whose father was executed as a spy by Arabs?

It is quite likely that everything you think you know about terror attacks such as the one in Detroit or whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead comes from Rita Katz. Does she make it all up? We don’t know, nobody knows, nobody checks, they simply buy it, print it, say it comes from Site Intelligence and simply forget to tell us that this is, not only a highly biased organization but also an extremely amateur one also.

Is any of this her fault, Rita's? No. She is herself, selling her work. The blame is not Site Intelligence, it is the people who pass on the information under misleading circumstances.

Imagine if a paper carried a story like this:

Reports that Al Qaeda was responsible for bombing the mosque and train station were given to us by an Israeli woman who says she found it on the internet.

This is fair. Everyone should be able to earn a living and information that comes from Israel could be without bias but the chances aren’t very good. In fact, any news organization, and most use this service, that fails to indicate that the sources they use are "rumored" to be a foreign intelligence service with a long history of lying beyond human measure, is not to be taken seriously.

Can we prove that SITE Intelligence is the Mossad? No. Would a reasonable person assume it is? Yes.

Would a reasonable person believe anything from this source involving Islam or the Middle East? No, they would not.

SITE’s primary claim to fame other than bin Laden videos with odd technical faults is their close relationship with Blackwater. Blackwater has found site useful. Blackwater no longer exists as they had to change their name because of utter lack of credibility.

What can be learned by examining where our news comes from? Perhaps we could start being realistic and begin seeing much of our own news and the childish propaganda it really is.

Propaganda does two things:
1. It makes up phony reasons to justify acts of barbaric cruelty or insane greed.
2. It blames people for things they didn’t do because the people doing the blaming really did it themselves. We call these things "false flag/USS Liberty" incidents.

Next time you see dancing Palestinians and someone tells you they are celebrating a terror attack, it is more likely they are attending a birthday party. This is what we have learned, perhaps this is what we had best remember.

From an AFP article on Site Intelligence:

Rita Katz and S.I.T.E. are set to release yet another "aL-Qaeda" tape

Despite a massive manhunt by the world’s intelligence agencies, BL seems to evade their combined efforts, staying on the run. But he still has time to drop into his recording studio and cook up a fresh tape for the likes of Rita Katz and her outfit called S.I.T.E. SITE is staffed by TWO people, Katz and a Josh Devon.

WASHINGTON (AFP) The head of the Al-Qaeda network Osama bin Laden is expected to release a taped message on Iraq, a group monitoring extremist online forums said Thursday. The 56-minute tape by the hunted militant is addressed to Iraq and an extremist organization based there, the Islamic State of Iraq, said the US-based SITE monitoring institute, citing announcements on "jihadist forums."

It said the release was "impending" but did not say whether the message was an audio or video tape. Despite a massive manhunt and a 25-million-dollar bounty on his head, he has evaded capture and has regularly taunted the United States and its allies through warnings issued on video and audio cassettes. Source: ME Times

Yes, despite a massive manhunt by the world’s intelligence agencies, BL seems to evade their combined efforts, staying on the run. But he still has time to drop into his recording studio and cook up a fresh tape for the likes of Rita Katz and her outfit called S.I.T.E. SITE is staffed by TWO people, Katz and a Josh Devon.

Yet these two individuals manage to do what the ENTIRE combined assets of the world’s Western intelligence can’t:

Be the first to obtain fresh video and audio tapes from Al-Qaeda with Bin Laden making threats and issuing various other comments. If BL appears a bit "stiff" in the latest release, that’s because he is real stiff, as in dead.

How is it that a Jewish owned group like S.I.T.E. can outperform the world’s best and brightest in the intelligence field and be the first to know that a group like al-Qaeda is getting ready to release another tape?

How is it possible that Rita Katz and S.I.T.E. can work this magic? Maybe looking at Katz’s background will help:

Rita Katz is Director and co-founder of the SITE Institute. Born in Iraq, her father was tried and executed as an Israeli spy, whereupon her family moved to Israel [the move has been described as both an escape and an emigration in different sources]. She received a degree from the Middle Eastern Studies program at Tel Aviv University, and is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. She emigrated to the US in 1997.

Katz was called as a witness in the trial, but the government didn’t claim she was a terrorism expert. During the trial it was discovered that Katz herself had worked in violation of her visa agreement when she first arrived in America in 1997.

She also admitted to receiving more than $130,000 for her work as an FBI consultant on the case. Link

[Wombaticus Rex]

So the "17 minutes," that's the revelation of the method, right? Why do they love that number so much?

[Nordic]

http://www.opinion-maker.org/2009/12/is ... rror-news/

Damn, Alice, that's something to start a new thread with right there. I had no idea of any of that. Does it check out?

[AlicetheKurious]

I had no idea of any of that. Does it check out?

Yes, every word. What's incredible to me is that this is not common knowledge by now and that SITE continues to be cited as the sole source of so much of the bullshit dished out by supposedly respectable news media. It's quite amazing how often they explicitly name SITE, but less frequently they'll cite "investigators" or "an independent institute specializing in terrorism studies" or some similarly vague attribution.

The first time I ever heard of Rita Katz was in a fawning article in Reader's Digest around 7 or 8 years ago, if I'm not mistaken. It described her as "the housewife who succeeded where all the West's intelligence agencies failed" or something asinine like that. S.I.T.E. is the only source for "discovered" tapes and internet postings by the long-dead Bin Laden and the fictional arch-terrorist "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi", as well as those by Adam "Gadahn" aka Adam Perlman and other custom-designed terrorist sock-puppets whose job it is to substantiate zionist talking points and provide a 'factual' basis for hate-mongering against Muslim people. For years, the tapes or transcripts "translated" by Katz have been used as the basis for front-page news stories by mainstream outfits like the New York Times, sometimes but not always with the hollow caveat that the tapes "have not yet been independently verified" but, as JackRiddler said, they never are, and without scrutiny or investigation they go on to generate countless headlines and join the cannon of terrifying "evidence" for the hordes of Islamic terrorists disguised as innocent immigrants or citizens in Western countries.

Some, like Gordon Duff of Veterans Today have been struck by the fact that Rita Katz' fortuitous finds never encourage the "Jihadis" to physically attack Israel -- all her sock-puppets demand violent attacks against the U.S., Europe and Shi'a Muslims.

Does anyone wonder why Gadahn never calls for attacks on Israel? In fact, Al Qaeda doesn’t seem to know Israel exists. They never threaten Israel. They never attack Israel. They never even mention Israel, never. All those Osama bin Laden and Adam Perlman, sorry, “Adam Gadahn” tapes have one thing in common.

Israel doesn’t exist. Get the picture? Here is what Perlman, let's be straight about it, his name is Perlman, his family is Jewish, Zionist, and very active in the ADL. This is what he or is it ‘they” are advocating in this statement released yesterday:

“emigrant communities like those which live on the margins of society in the miserable suburbs of Paris, London and Detroit, or are from those arriving in America or Europe to study in its universities or seek their daily bread in the streets of its cities….you have an opportunity to strike the leaders of unbelief and retaliate against them on their own soil, as long as there is no covenant between you and them”

Clear and simple, we are hearing what Israel is telling the world: the Muslim world is the voice of Al Qaeda. What is Israel, or rather “Al Qaeda” telling us? Please attack Britain, France and the United States but leave Israel alone.

Detroit has a Muslim population of 300,000 yet, the one terrorist attack there was done by a mentally incompetent Nigerian national. Do you remember the “crotch bomber?” Do you wonder why the story disappeared from the news so quickly? When two Detroit attorneys caught airport officials putting the terrorist on a plane, airport officials working for an Israeli company, things fell apart. When Veterans Today discovered from intelligence sources in both Nigeria and Ghana that the boy’s family was not only tied directly to the CIA but the father was a business partner in an Israeli defense firm, it came apart further. When this came out, a news “blackout” fell and the story died.

When the government of Yemen found laptop computers belonging to “Al Qaeda” that showed a clear record of daily contacts with “handlers” in Israel, the story died totally. Link

Rita Katz' "mentor" before she branched out on her own was Steven Emerson, most notorious for his "expert" opinion that the Oklahoma City bombing was the work of "Muslim Jihadists".

Hadassah, in a profile on Katz, notes that she "honed her skills while working at the Investigative Project think tank run by counterterrorism expert Steven Emerson." Again, that should give the press pause. From Eyal Press' "Neocon Man" (The Nation):

Steven Emerson, another self-styled terrorism expert, who gained notoriety in the immediate aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing for suggesting that it bore a "Middle Eastern trait."

If Emerson is new to you, check out John F. Sugg's "Steven Emerson's Crusade: Why is a journalist pushing questionable stories from behind the scenes?" (FAIR's EXTRA!) and "Steve Emerson Eats Crow" (CounterPunch).

That is Katz's mentor. Also in Hadassah, she dismisses her mother's contradictions of her own version of life in Iraq and her father, who was not around after Katz turned six, with "It doesn't matter. These are my memories." Which is probably her explanation for her work on terrorism as well. (Note that Katz's father was executed in Iraq and Katz wouldn't learn of that until over a decade later.) Link

The New Yorker published a profile of her in 2006 called Private Jihad: How Rita Katz got into the spying business which pretends to be a hard-hitting piece but simply regurgitates Katz' claims as fact. It's a puff piece that, instead of checking the telling gaps in her story, blithely ignores them, effectively using the New Yorker to promote her not-so-hidden agenda.

Emerson, Katz, Daniel Pipes and Frank Gaffney, among others, are members of a professional zionist disinformation network whose history of manufacturing false evidence to support their agenda of racist incitement are glossed over by the mainstream media outlets that simply promote them to a gullible public as "terrorism experts", or even more outrageously, as "experts on Islamic movements". As agents of Israeli intelligence, they're doing their job; it's American journalists and American investigators who are not doing theirs. Not only are these fakers shielded from accountability for their constant stream of lies and fabrications, they get to laugh all the way to the bank while innocent people end up with shattered lives because of them.