George W. Bush's deputy counsel, John Michael Farren, has been charged with the attempted murder of his wife. A confidential Cannonfire source reports that Farren told investigators: "Wait -- you're saying that's against the law?"

I agree with Brad Friedman:

Furthermore, we hope they don't try to disbar Farren over this policy difference between him and his wife. Politicizing his belief that she should no longer be alive would just be wrong, set a very bad precedent for future administration attorneys, and put our nation at even greater danger from terrorism.

Barack Obama now says that, contrary to popular belief, he did not actually run on an anti-spousal-homicide platform. Permalink

For the most part, I don't understand why people get upset when a magazine cover or advertising image has been through the Photoshop wringer. That's like getting upset with a painting because it's rectangular. These days, just about every image on the newsracks has been "improved" in some way.

What bugs me is when the "improvements" are stupid. Quite a few people are talking about this ad featuring Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame...


Poor Emma looks as though she need no longer buy shoes by the pair. "Kneecapus disappearus!" And why is one pant leg so much shorter than the other?

What really bothers me are the bags under her eyes, which are about as large (and ugly) as the handbag in her hand. What, is she using? Has her boyfriend been abusive? I mean, if you are going to slather on the P-shop, wouldn't it be a good idea to make your model look like she's had some sleep within the past 72 hours?

Here's one that no-one else seems to have noticed. The DVD of the Sandra Bullock vehicle All About Steve has two different covers, one of which is reproduced below:



Uhhh...Sandra? What's with the elbow?


Here's a publicity shot for the new American Idol line-up. A lot of people are wondering whether this one was Photoshopped. Hey, it's not even a question: Look at the face of Ellen Degeneres, and take special note of the direction of the light. Now look at how the shadows fall on all the other faces.


Changing the light direction on a face is one of the most difficult tasks that any Photoshop retoucher will ever encounter -- often, the job is simply impossible. In this case, the artist did not even try. Permalink

Obama and the CIA: According to Wayne Madsen, the White House press office has made it clear that they do not want any journalists asking about Obama's post-graduate employment with "Business International Corporation (BIC), a global financial and political information company that WMR previously reported was a front for the CIA."

A lot of people don't trust Madsen. I treat him warily. To be fair, though, Madsen does seem to have gotten there first on the BIC story. Here's what he wrote in February of 2009:

After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, Barack Obama went to work for a firm called Business International Corporation (BIC), a firm that was linked to economic intelligence gathering for the CIA. For one year, Obama worked as a researcher in BIC's financial services division where he wrote for two BIC publications, Financing Foreign Operations and Business International Money Report, a weekly newsletter. An informed source has told WMR that Obama's tuition debt at Columbia was paid off by BIC.

I printed much the same thing in August, based on reporting by John Pilger and William Blum. Having fallen out of the habit of reading Madsen, I did not know that he had gotten there first.

I'm fascinated by the claim involving Obama's tuition debt. After school, Obama seems never to have cared much about paying back student loans. He pinballed his way through three very expensive institutions of higher learning without fretting about how he was going to pay for it all.

When I was making the high-school-to-college transition, I had some friends from affluent families, and they never seriously contemplated Occidental: It was too pricey. So how did Obama do it?

That said, please recall that we're dealing with a claim, not a fact. Madsen's source is unnamed. That's a common problem in Madsen-land.

Colombia: Madsen offers an even more intriguing claim, also based (I'm sorry to say) on info from anonymous tipsters:

WMR has learned from informed sources in Kabul that Obama has been extremely friendly, through personal correspondence on White House letterhead, with a private military company that counts among its senior personnel a number of Afghan mujaheddin-Soviet war veterans who fought alongside the late Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Masood. The firm is also involved in counter-insurgency operations in Colombia, where Obama is building seven new military bases, and Iraq.

Seven new bases in Colombia? Yes. Madsen is not the only one with this story.

The odd thing is, Obama has denied the reported military project:

"There have been those in the region who have been trying to play this up as part of a traditional anti-Yankee rhetoric. This is not accurate," Obama told Hispanic media reporters.

"We have had a security agreement with Colombia for many years now. We have updated that agreement. We have no intent in establishing a U.S. military base in Colombia," Obama said.

Yet later in the same Reuters story, we learn:

The new security arrangement would allow the Pentagon to lease access to seven Colombian military bases for U.S. support in fighting drug traffickers and guerrillas involved in the cocaine trade.

The agreement would also increase the number of American troops in Colombia above the current total of less than 300 but not more than 800, the maximum permitted under the existing pact.

Okay, so we are leasing bases, not building them. And we are adding more troops. But Obama says that we are not establishing a U.S. military base in Colombia.

Of course, Obama said that he would also renegotiate NAFTA. Speaking of which, here's a disconcerting sub-head in the WSJ:

Obama to Colombia: Military base now, free trade later.

I vote for neither.

A lot of Obots thought they were voting for neither. Now they're in the rationalization business -- which I, thank Jeebus, do not have be in.

If you don't mind reading SocialistWorker.org (odd, isn't it, how all real socialists can't stand Obama?), chew on this:

The current conflict centers around the October 30 signing of a military pact between Colombia and the U.S. that gives the American armed forces the use of seven military bases in Colombia, and grants immunity to U.S. soldiers operating in there.

Colombian President Álvaro Uribe and President Barack Obama claim that the U.S. military presence in Colombia will serve only to combat narco-traffickers and leftist guerillas, not threaten Colombia's neighbors. Yet as the Venezuelanalysis.com Web site reports, this claim "is contradicted by the 2010 fiscal year budget of the U.S. Air Force Military Construction Program, which states that...the pact 'provides a unique opportunity for full-spectrum operations in a critical sub-region of our hemisphere' and 'supports mobility missions by providing access to the entire continent.'"

Sounds like Obama is trying to double-talk us into war. Just like Dubya. And anyone who thinks that American covert operatives are in the business of stopping the drug trade must be high. The only guys who get stopped are competitors.

So who or what is the private military contractor involved with these bases? Here is a bit from a handy-dandy Wikipedia article on such contractors:

In 2006, a U.S. congressional report listed a number of PMCs and other enterprises that have signed contracts to carry out anti-narcotics operations and related activities as part of Plan Colombia. DynCorp was among those contracted by the State Department, while others signed contracts with the Defense Department. Other companies from different countries, including Israel, have also signed contracts with the Colombian Defense Ministry to carry out security or military activities.

So, could Madsen have been referring to DynCorp? Possibly. Here's a cute little DynCorp fact you may not know:

According to whistleblower Ben Johnston, a former aircraft mechanic who worked for the company in Bosnia, Dyncorp employees and supervisors engaged in sex with 12 to 15 year old children, and sold them to each other as slaves.

Lovely. Johnston was, of course, fired, and his charges did not lead to an official investigation. DynCorp continues to receive billions of taxpayer dollars. And just to add to the cynicism quotient, we learn that DynCorp has also been accused of trafficking in narcotics out of Colombia:

According to a monthly DEA intelligence report from last year, officers of Colombia's National Police force intercepted and opened, on May 12, 2000, a US-bound Federal Express package at Bogota's El Dorado International Airport. The parcel "contained two (2) small bottles of a thick liquid" that "had the same consistency as motor oil." The communiqué goes on to report that the liquid substance "tested positive for heroin" and that the "alleged heroin laced liquid weighed approximately 250 grams."...the package belonged [to] an unnamed employee of DynCorp, who was sending the parcel to the company's Andean operations headquarters at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida.

Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky wants to ban the use of private military contractors. Fat chance, but I appreciate the fact that Schakowsky gets it.

"Reports that DynCorp employees have been implicated in drug trafficking, the very thing they are paid to help prevent, only strengthens my conviction that outsourcing is the wrong policy...."

Well, it's the right policy if you're out to make some money as a dope peddler.

DynCorp is also involved in a big way in -- you guessed it -- Afghanistan. Among many other tasks, DynCorp trains the Afghan police forces, which are universally despised:

"The police would stop people driving on motorcycles, beat them and take their money," said Mohammad Gul, an elder in the village of Pankela, which British troops have been securing for the past three days after flying in by helicopter.

He pointed to two compounds of neighbors where pre-teen children had been abducted by police to be used for the local practice of "bachabazi," or sex with pre-pubescent boys.

"If the boys were out in the fields, the police would come and rape them," he said. "You can go to any police base and you will see these boys. They hold them until they are finished with them and then let the child go."

Small wonder the Taliban has enjoyed a renewed popularity.

Remember all those stories about KBR and Haliburton getting no-bid contracts in Iraq? Same shit, different day.

Last year DynCorp and Fluor, together with KBR, became part of the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or Logcap, a huge contract once awarded exclusively to KBR.

In July the Pentagon announced that it planned on having DynCorp and Fluor take over KBR's work in Afghanistan under Logcap, doing everything from providing laundry to food and fuel. The decision came as President Obama sent 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan to go after the Taliban in an expanding war.

I'm beginning to wonder: Is Obama Bush III -- or is he Cheney II?

DynCorp brags about its anti-narcotics activities. But last year, we saw a couple of stories that make one wonder.

In April, a DynCorp employee in Afghanistan -- a security team leader involved with training those wonderful Afghan cops -- was found dead of a drug overdose:

Investigators are looking into a number of allegations, including that the employee procured drugs on monthly trips to Thailand, and that his superiors were aware of his conduct and failed to take action...

Thailand? Why would a DynCorp guy training cops in Afghanistan be going to Thailand on a routine basis? Apparently, the company knew about these trips...

The probe also involves allegations that the employee was arrested by Thai police in March for stealing a $14,000 watch; that employees who spoke about the issue to State Department officials were threatened with retaliation by supervisors; and that company drug testing following the man's death resulted in four other employees testing positive, the sources said.

So wrote the WP; if there were follow-up reports, I have not seen them.

Pretty much the exact same thing occurred to another DynCorp employee in September:

A U.S. contractor helping to train Afghanistan's national police was found dead of a possible drug overdose last week in Kabul, just months after the State Department reprimanded his company for another worker's drug-related death.

The Afghan cops are widely thought to be involved in the drug trade. Maybe their trainers are getting a cut?

DynCorp receives massive U.S. government contracts to combat narcotics in Afghanistan, yet -- surprise, surprise! -- the trade has exploded there. Your tax dollars built a $37 million bridge (outsourced to an Italian firm!) between Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and that bridge has now proven to be an enormous boon to heroin traffickers.

"You can give your bag of heroin to one of the guards, and he will carry it across for you."

Remember, DynCorp trains security personnel in Afghanistan. To be fair, I don't know if they have ever trained any H-toting guards who work on that bridge.

The U.S.-financed bridge has made drug trafficking even easier, truck driver Mohammed said with a toothy smile: "You load the truck with drugs."

The ferry that used to operate at Nizhny Panj carried about 40 trucks a day. The bridge can carry 1,000 vehicles daily.

Every day last year - extrapolating from United Nations estimates - an average of more than 4 metric tons of opium, which can be made into some 1,320 pounds of heroin, moved on the northern route. Put another way, the equivalent of nearly 6 million doses of pure heroin - at 100 milligrams each - is carried across the northern Afghan border each day.

Maybe that's why Obama escalated. He is putting in enough troops to protect the profitable status quo -- but not enough to transform Afghanistan into a modern, civilized nation.

Why do you think they call it Hopium? Permalink

From Time's profile of Ben Bernanke, chosen as the person of the year:

Before George W. Bush brought him to Washington, Bernanke's only political experience was on his local school board.

This may be the most ominous sentence ever composed in English or any other language.

(Sorry about the light posting lately. I've been trying to help a friend pass the GRE, which is, to a large degree, a vocabulary test. Ten-dollar words hold no terror for me, but those words -- yeesh! Ten bucks barely covers the state tax!) Permalink

At the Confluence, Bostonboomer has an excellent piece up on the suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA officers and a Jordanian intelligence officer. I haven't the time to write at the length I would prefer, but I did want to note the latest: The bomber was a Jordanian double-agent who had provided information about targets in Afghanistan.

Traditionally, double and triple agents have always raised questions: Who's he really working for? Which side holds his true loyalty?

In this case, we have a pretty damned clear idea.

What we don't know yet is who the primary target was: The CIA officers or the Jordanian, Captain Al Shareef Ali bin Zeid.

There has been some question as to the actual nature of the U.S. personnel. Many news articles and blog posts have freely used the initials "CIA," which often serves (in public discussion) as an all-purpose term for the American intelligence community. A few news stories have hinted that some of the victims worked for the private firm Blackwater, which was recently renamed Xe. One victim has been identified as an Army officer working for the State Department.

I suppose we should get used to the new terminology: The National Clandestine Service (NCS) has recently taken over the functions of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, and thus now handles all in-the-field HUMINT, or human intelligence gathering. The NCS now handles the Agency's special ops/paramilitary functions, which means that they are in charge of the elite Special Activities Division, or SAD.

I'm not making this up: The covert op guys you see in movie shoot-em-ups are actually SAD. You never hear that term used in movies, probably because Arnold Schwarzenegger would sound really stupid identifying himself as an agent of SAD.

These guys are also SOG, which stands for Special Operations Group. You'll sometimes see the term SAD/SOG. AH-nuld would sound really stupid saying that.

It gets yet more complex. The Defense Department maintains the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which controls the Special Missions Units (SMUs), which is the catch-all term for Delta Force, ISA and the SEALs, plus an undisclosed number of Task Forces and ultra-elite paramilitary units so secret that we aren't supposed to know their names -- even though we do pay for them. The JSOC folks often work in tandem with Blackwater/Xe mercenaries (who probably don't like being called mercenaries, even though that's what they are). The Blackwater folk are highly esteemed because Eric Prince hires "old hands" with lots of experience.

Legally, the JSOC is not allowed to conduct covert ops on their own initiative. That's supposed to be the job of the NCS. So the JSOC "coordinates" with the SAD/SOG folk. The SAD agents are usually recruited from the SMUs.

Is your head spinning yet? Mine is. The situation is deliberately complex. Complexity helps to stave off inquiries from Congress or snoopy members of the press.

The bottom line is simple: We mere mortals may never know just who employs these paramilitary guys and covert operators. When they are in the field, they are supposed to be completely deniable.

If a Blackwater operative gets into trouble, the CIA can tell Congress and the press: "Hey, don't blame us. A retired merc working for the private sector went off on his own and did something stupid." But in the end, we can be pretty certain those guys were getting orders from someone within the CIA-NCS hierarchy.

Blackwater, in a sense, serves a function comparable to that of Evergreen Aviation, a private firm closely tied to the CIA. Evergreen runs an air museum in McMinville, Oregon, where they keep the Spruce Goose. But the various Evergreen facilities also provide "civilian" aircraft which can be used for covert operations. If one of those planes goes down in a hot zone, the CIA can claim "Not one of ours. It's simply private enterprise at work."

Let's get back to the people who were recently killed in Afghanistan. We are told that they

collected intelligence on the militant commanders living on both sides of the border and helped run paramilitary campaigns that tired to kill those commanders, including the drone program that has killed a dozen senior al Qaeda with missiles fired from unpiloted aircraft.

JSOC and Blackwater/Xe personnel have been running the drone program. On this point, we have contradictory information: The head of Blackwater, Eric Prince, says that his personnel do pick targets for the drones, while JSOC has denied Blackwater's involvement.

Writing for the Nation, Jeremy Scahill developed sources who gave him some idea as to who was behind the drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This paragraph will either clear things up or make your head explode:

The military intelligence source says that the drone strike that reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, his wife and his bodyguards in Waziristan in August was a CIA strike, but that many others attributed in media reports to the CIA are actually JSOC strikes. "Some of these strikes are attributed to OGA [Other Government Agency, intelligence parlance for the CIA], but in reality it's JSOC and their parallel program of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] because they also have access to UAVs. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes." The Pentagon has stated bluntly, "There are no US military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan."

Blurring the distinction between the military and the CIA is convenient. Life is easier when you get to blame your mistakes on someone else. The Pentagon can honestly state that there are no military strike operations in Pakistan because the operations are being run by the NCS. But the NCS are using military guys. So really, who is kidding whom?

The head of the NCS is a fellow named Michael Sulick, who served as the Deputy Director of Operations under Porter Goss for about a month in 2004. Then he quit the CIA for mysterious reasons. Sulick came back in 2007, after Goss had left. Obviously, the guy had a strong disagreement with Goss. (I wonder if he had problems with Dusty Foggo, of Cunningham scandal infamy?) There's a story there, one which we will probably learn one of these decades.

If you want to know more about the seven murdered officers, ask Sulick. Alas, I doubt that you'll get much out of him.

Added note: As long as we're talking about double agents, have you considered the possibility that the exploding underwear fellow might belong in this category? That scenario would explain a lot of things, including 1. the sightings of Farouk at his Dad's retirement party, 2. the mystery videographer, and 3. the well-dressed "handler" at the airport.

What it doesn't explain is the exploding underwear. Setting one's privates on fire seems a bit much to ask of any double agent. Permalink

Antifascist -- who got his blog-start in these very cyber-pages -- has a superb piece up about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23 year-old Nigerian who attempted to blow up a jetliner by sewing the explosive PETN into his underwear. (I wrote a long piece about Farouk a couple of days ago.) Antifascist notes the latest developments:

The Observer revealed January 3 that the British secret state had Abdulmutallab on their radar for several years and that he had become "politically involved" with "extremist networks" while a student at University College London, where he served as president of the Islamic Society.

Examining "e-mail and text traffic," security officers claim to have belatedly discovered that "he has been in contact with jihadists from across the world since 2007."

Indeed, The Sunday Times disclosed that the 23-year-old terrorism suspect was "'reaching out' to extremists whom MI5 had under surveillance." The officials said that Abdulmutallab was "'starting out on a journey' in Britain" that culminated with last week's attempt to destroy Flight 253.

It is claimed by unnamed "British officials" that "none of this information was passed" to their American counterparts; on the face of it, this appears to be a rank mendacity.

From the Sunday Times story:

British officials have now passed a file to their US counterparts on Abdulmutallab’s activities in Britain while he was a student from 2005 to 2008. It shows his repeated contacts with MI5 targets who were subject to phone taps, email intercepts and other forms of surveillance.

Intelligence officials have defended their decision not to flag Abdulmutallab as a possible terrorist risk. They say he was one of many youths who mix with extremists, but are not themselves thought to be involved in plotting or supporting terrorism.

Always remember: Last May, the Brits decided not to let Farouk back into the U.K. (I call him Farouk, as his father does.)

I'm wondering how this fellow could have possibly escaped the attention of the CIA, considering the importance of his father. As Scott Creighton notes, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab is one of the wealthiest men in Africa.

Although Nigeria is an oil-rich nation, most of its population lives on $1 a day. The wealth is skimmed by a thoroughly corrupt upper class:

Greed, and unfettered desire for unnecessary vulgarity has brought the nation to its knees. The level of insensitivity and immorality displayed by the thieving few is unfathomable, making Nigeria become the symbol of anything but greed, corruption and graft of unimaginable proportions.

This group of undeserving few have hijacked the nation’s wealth through foul means and have consigned the rest of the majority to unthinkable poverty.

It is hard not to see Umaru Mutallab -- former Nigerian Minister of Economic Development and Chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria -- as an exemplar of that corruption.

Umaru's primary wife is from Yemen, a fact which may or may not prove very important. He has more than one wife, and Farouk was born to one of the wives held in lesser esteem (a point Creighton misses). The paterfamilias does have even more important connections to Yemen, the country where Farouk trained. Umaru heads up Jaiz Bank International, Nigeria's first Islamic bank -- which, says Creighton, is in essence a branch of the Islamic Development Bank:

...the IDB is also heavily invested in the neoliberal reforms of Yemen’s economy which are at this very moment, under serious risk of the ongoing revolution in that country.

So. Dad works for the Milton Friedmanites who are ruining that part of the world, and Sonny-Boy runs with the rebels in Yemen who recently forced the U.S. embassy in that country to shut down.

Don't you think that's a little weird? I do.

You know what's even weirder? In November, Umaru ratted out his son to the American embassy -- i.e., to the CIA, with whom he must have had previous contact. But in December, Farouk was in Lagos for Dad's retirement party.

A family source said Farouk was “generally around” during the celebrations marking his father's retirement from First Bank, but would not elaborate any further as Dr. Umaru Muttallab has ordered all members of the family to cease further cooperation with the media.

The retirement was rather sudden and occurred just a week before Christmas.

Farouk bought his tickets in Ghana on December 16. What did he do between the 16th and the 25th? That's the key period. Apparently, he hung out with Dad in Lagos -- and Dad has kept quiet about that fact. This, despite the claim that Farouk called Dad in October an announced that the conversation would be his "last contact" with the family!

Scott Creighton has a neat little theory to explain everything:

Did Daddy Warbucks sell Little Orphan Umar to the CIA?

Creighton's theory zeroes in on Yemen. There is a lot of pressure on Obama right now to step up involvement in Yemen.

Now, here is what we have learned;
• Yemen increased its national debt to the tune of 5 billion dollars from July to September of this year (they may have borrowed more since Sept). The IMF, World Bank, and Paris Club members are on the hook for that money if the revolution in Yemen is successful.
• A World Bank and IMF indebted super wealthy “free-market” reformer in Nigeria goes to the State Department and then to the CIA in Nigeria to talk about his son.
• That same son, for reasons unknown decides “out of the blue” to sit on a small amount of explosives in a plane in Detroit. The CIA somehow misses the warning signs.
• The FBI announces immediately that the son “confessed’ that it was all Yemen’s fault.
• After the attack, all the banking controlled congressmen and the Obama administration announce we will attack “the terrorists” in Yemen and thus help “stabilize” the current corrupt government of that nation.

Daddy Warbucks, whose banking ties are under threat of serious set-backs, goes to the State Department and then the CIA and all of a sudden his lonely, college drop-out, populist son, ends up getting on a flight and setting his nuts on fire and the good-old U.S. of A can now come running in to the rescue to save all those precious investments in Yemen that are directly tied to, you guessed it, the underwear bomber’s daddy. A small world, ain’t it?

Well, I can't go that far. It's hard for me to believe that any 23 year-old kid would set his balls on fire just to make Big Daddy happy. Even Tennessee Williams couldn't sell that story.

Still, there is the strange detail of the videographer.

A mystery man kept his camera going throughout the entire flight, as though expecting an incident to occur. We have at least two perfectly congruent and credible eyewitness descriptions of this "mystery movie-maker," who has made no attempt to capitalize on his remarkable footage.

There may be an innocent explanation for that. But right now, the situation seems more than a little suspicious. A mystery videographer who films the whole flight suggests advanced knowledge of a "terror" scheme which was intended to fail.

I'm open to theories, scenarios, new ideas. Got any?

UPDATE: I just noticed that my earlier post was referenced on Rigorous Intuition, where the towering intellectuals actually managed to avoid their usual mindless cliche: "Too bad Cannon refuses to acknowledge the laws of physics..."

One of the commenters there got off a line so good it bears repeating:

We know why the CIA did nothing with the warning message from this Nigerian suspect's father.

What would you do with an e-mail beginning "I am the president of a Nigerian bank and I have something vitally important you can help with...

Permalink

I strongly urge you to watch (or at least hear) this important interview with Dr. Robert Johnson, who articulates Obama's massive lost opportunity on financial re-regulation.

Johnson talks about making the ratings agencies -- the folks who gave Triple-A ratings to financial instruments based on crap loans -- into public utilities. Johnson says that this could lead to "problems." No doubt that's true, but to me they look like problems we can live with, especially when compared to what we have now.

At any rate, this is all a matter of belling the cat. Obama's narrow window of opportunity has closed, now that the inane "socialist" meme has taken root. Not for the first time in history, right-wing populists who pretend to hate the big bankers have actually made it easier for those bankers to screw us. The new financial regulations will do for the Wall Street fat cats what heath care reform has done for the insurance fat cats.

I disagree with Johnson on one point: This was not an issue of the "progressives" being unready. They had plenty of time. They had access to smart guys who favored temporary nationalization, or receivership, of the zombie banks.

The problem was that the "progressives" in power were not really progressive. Obama and his cronies were Chicago schoolers, in every sense of the word. Many of his media manipulators -- Moulitsas, Huffington, Aravosis, Sullivan -- were of a cognate quasi-libertarian stripe. The sitch we're in is the sitch they wanted.

Of course, a lot of genuine, well-meaning lefties were sucked in by the hype. No amount of pathetically obvious revisionism can blind us to the disgusting "freeper"-style tactics of the Obots who gave us this day. Thanks to the fiends and dupes who commandeered the Democratic party, the banks will continue to go unregulated, which means that a new financial collapse is coming -- and when it comes, the "left" will be saddled with responsibility for the disaster.

Throughout 2008, progressives refused to look at who was funding Obama. They refused to acknowledge his history of brazen lying. They demonized, harassed, threatened and libeled anyone who saw the man for what he really was. And they refused to understand one of the most basic facts of the political universe: Any politician who gets hosannas from Chris Matthews, Maureen Dowd, Charles Krauthammer, Arianna Huffington, Andrew Sullivan and all the other monsters who hated Gore must be pure shit. Permalink

(ADDED NOTE: I now see the big problem with this post -- it's a long piece and the original research comes at the end. That bit of original research is, I think, important stuff. So if you're pressed for time, scroll down to the words "The ICTS mystery." You'll see that phrase in boldface mid-way through point ten. Can't miss it.)

Let's start the New Year paranoid.

I've tried to avoid writing about the Nigerian wanna-be terrorist Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab (known to his family as Farouk), the 23 year-old Islamic lonelyheart whose abortive effort to blow up Northwest flight 253 on Christmas Day ended with an intact jet and a charred genital region. The lesson: If you sew PETN into your underwear, you may put a damper on your sex life. Not that the virginal Farouk had one.

Correspondents seem to expect me to come up with a radical new conspiracy theory to explain this incident. Alas, I don't have such a theory. The best I can offer is a summary of some of the unconventional claims which have popped up in various news and blog articles. If you are the kind of nitwit who presumes that mentioning an odd claim automatically equals acceptance and approval of such a claim, please dive head-first into a vat of fire ants.

Oddity 1: Did Farouk have a passport? The initial reports said that he did not. We heard that he had boarded the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight by impersonating a refugee from Sudan.

Later, we were told that he did have a passport: See here for a picture of the thing. But if he did have a passport, the following report becomes doubly inexplicable...

Oddity 2: Who was that well-dressed accomplice? Kurt and Lori Haskell, of Newport MI, were on the flight. At the boarding gate in Amsterdam, they saw Farouk arrive in the company of an as-yet unidentified man.

While Mutallab was poorly dressed, his friend was dressed in an expensive suit, Haskell said. He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, 'He's from Sudan and we do this all the time.'”

Mutallab is Nigerian. Haskell believes the man may have been trying to garner sympathy for Mutallab's lack of documents by portraying him as a Sudanese refugee.

The ticket agent referred Mutallab and his companion to her manager down the hall, and Haskell didn't see Mutallab again until after he allegedly tried to detonate an explosive on the plane.

The "he-had-a-passport-all-along" reports did not come out until after the Haskell account hit the headlines. The sighting of an accomplice was thus effectively discredited. As CBS puts it:

But the Dutch counter-terrorism unit's investigation into Abdulmutallab's passport pokes holes in the theory that the alleged bomber had help evading security.

Note that CBS suddenly places us in the realm of "theory," as opposed to eyewitness testimony.

Note as well that the Washington Times (linked above) saw fit to mention the "impersonating-a-Sudanese" story without mentioning Haskell's "accomplice" story -- even though the Haskells, as far as I can see, were the original source for the "Sudanese" bit.

Or were they?

Oddity 3: Security videos. Kurt Haskell has asked the FBI about any security videos which would confirm his story, but the FBI has refused to answer. These days, it would be silly to believe that Farouk was not photographed at the airport.

Oddity 4: Were there Aftrican helpers? This story from an African news journal contains a noteworthy paragraph:

Upon arrival in Lagos, he changed that ticket and boarded a flight to Detroit via Amsterdam. Although Nigerian authorities claimed he "sneaked into Nigeria” on Christmas Eve to board the KLM flight to Amsterdam, Saharareporter sources said Farouk had been around Lagos before and after he went to Ghana, for some reason, to purchase the ticket that he later changed in Lagos. It would appear that Nigerian security officials are covering up privileged people that may have provided material support to Umar as he prepared to depart for the US, although it is conceivable they may have helped him without knowing his mission.

"Privileged people"? As Jerry Seinfeld used to say: "Who are these people?"

Incidentally, this same report also mentions that Farouk may have a sister in New York, that he was in Lagos for his father's retirement party (even though other reports say that he was estranged from his family), and that the formerly loquacious paterfamilias has now ordered all family members not to talk to the media.

Oddity 5: What does it take to get on the "no fly" list? Farouk's father, a very prominent banker in Nigeria, became concerned about his son's religious extremism and warned the American embassy. It seems odd for a father to rat out his son. And why did Farouk attend Dad's retirement party if Dad was ratting him out?

Farouk spent time in Yemen, where he seems to have associated with Al Qaeda militants. The CIA apparently knew that someone called "the Nigerian" was in contact with Al Qaeda in that country. In May, Farouk was blocked from re-entry into Britain.

Let's repeat that: He was blocked from re-entry into Britain.

Farouk appeared on the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database, which is compiled by the good folks at the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. That database contains about half-a-million names.

Yet he was not placed on the "no fly" list.

So who has appeared on the list? ACLU attorney David Fathi, David Nelson of Ozzie and Harriet fame, Army colonel and Democratic political candidate Robert J. Johnson, congressman John Lewis (also a Democrat), Nelson Mandela and Ted Kennedy. In 2007, Princeton professor Walter F. Murphy could not board an airliner; he was told that he was placed on the list because he had given speeches critical of George W. Bush.

I guess Farouk just didn't have what it takes.

Oddity 6: Is there an Al Qaeda connection? The CIA says that Farouk was "the Nigerian" who communicated with Al Qaeda in Yemen. He has confessed to training with an Al Qaeda bomb-maker. Yet the Obama administration downplays all talk of a conspiracy. Moreover:

A Yemini-based Al Qaeda group has claimed responsibility for the attack, praising Abudulmutallab's attempt to blow up Flight 253 with about 3 ounces of the powerful explosive PETN stashed inside a pair of specially-made underwear, reports CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian.

Responding to this report, the CIA dropped a rather interesting piece of information:

"We learned of him in November, when his father came to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria and sought help in finding him. We did not have his name before then," said Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman.

The father's warning was taken with sufficient seriousness to be passed along to the CIA. And the CIA already knew of a person called "the Nigerian" who was palling around with Al Qaeda types in Yemen. So the question is: Did the the CIA connect Farouk to "the Nigerian" in November? The careful wording of Gimigliano's statement leaves the possibility wide open.

For what it is worth, Chris Wallace of Fox News says that the CIA had been tracking Farouk since August. Yet he didn't make the "no fly" list.

In an "official" statement, an Al Qaeda group claimed responsibility for the attack, which was carried out (supposedly) in retaliation for bombing raids on an Al Qaeda base in Yemen. As "Casual Observer" at FDL notes, those bombing raids took place on December 17 and 24. However:

Harold Demuren, the head of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, says Abdulmutallab’s ticket came from a KLM office in Accra, Ghana. Demuren said Monday that Abdulmutallab bought the $2,831 round-trip ticket from Lagos, Nigeria, to Detroit via Amsterdam on Dec. 16.

The chronology doesn't work.

Oddity 7: Instant mythology. In right-wingerland, a bogus story is making the rounds. According to this yarn, Farouk had two Al Qaeda helpers identified as Gitmo detainees released into the custody of Saudi Arabia for rehabilitation.

You read that right. They were sent to Saudi Arabia to attend a Jihad rehabilitation center where they were given paint and crayons. Isn’t that nice!

And the propaganda just never stops...

Oddity 8: Is there a tape? Previously, we mentioned the airport security videos which may or may not support the Haskell narrative. But we also have persuasive accounts of an amateur videotape taken within the aircraft itself during the incident. This report comes from passenger Patricia Keepman, who sat roughly 20 rows behind Farouk:

Her daughter said that ahead of them was a man who videotaped the entire flight, including the attempted detonation.

"He sat up and videotaped the entire thing, very calmly," said Patricia. "We do know that the FBI is looking for him intensely. Since then, we've heard nothing about it."

The entire flight? Who does that?

See also here:

In the midst of passengers trying to subdue Abdulmutallab and flight attendants working to put out the fire, Taylor says he looked behind him and saw a man filming the situation about two to five rows back.

"I looked behind me as the flight attendant ran through, and I looked and there was a guy with a camera," Taylor says.

Taylor says he notified the FBI of what he saw, in hopes of helping them to obtain footage of the foiled attack.

"There’s definitely footage from the time it was mission critical, to the time they hauled (Abdulmutallab) to the front," Taylor says. "I told them 100 percent there was a guy filming."

Taylor and Keepman place the videographer in the same location. Their accounts are congruent and convincing.

So why haven't we seen the tape? Why haven't we heard from the person who did the filming?

A Dutch film-maker named Jasper Schuringa was on the flight, but he did no filming. In fact, he helped to subdue the crotch-bomber.

Oddity 9: Travel arrangements. Farouk came from a well-off family, but he had been estranged from his father for some time -- or so says the father. So where did he get the cash for his travels? If his family had shut off the spigot, who provided his egg-and-cheese money? We can trace him going back and forth to the UK, Ghana, Yemen, Amsterdam and the U.S. He paid for the final journey in cash -- which should have been a tip-off.

Oddly enough, he bought a round-trip ticket -- an odd choice for a man who planned to blow up his flight.

The flight went from Lagos, Nigeria to Amsterdam. Why did he purchase the ticket in Ghana?

No-one has attempted to answer an obvious question: Where did he put on the PETN-laden underwear -- Ghana or Lagos or Amsterdam? If Amsterdam, who was his contact? (I very much doubt that PETN is as easy to obtain as pot is in Amsterdam.)

Oddity 10: The inevitable Israeli connection. Well, you knew that a link of some sort had to crop up sooner or later. We can't have a conspiracy theory round-up without mentioning the Israeli security services.

Our reader b, in a comment appended to a previous post, found grounds for suspicion in the fact that Farouk boarded the jet -- with help from a well-attired Indian, or so we're told -- at Schiphol airport.

Guess whose main European HQ is based there!

I typed that before I confirmed who runs security there. Not that that's a surprise.

The reference goes to the Israelis. A Google query on "Schiphol Mossad" will turn up a number of interesting stories.

Before proceeding, perhaps we should review an interesting blast from the past, which reveals a little-known aspect of the 2001 "shoe bomber" incident. The following example of a "controlled" security breach may be relevant to the more recent Christmas attack:

Six months prior to Reid's near shoe bombing of American Airlines flight 63 from Paris to Miami in December 2001, while memories of 9/11 were still fresh in everyone's mind, Reid attempted to board an El Al flight from Schiphol to Tel Aviv. Reid was taken aside by El Al security and identified as a terrorist suspect. Reid paid for a one-way ticket with cash and would not reveal what he planned to do in Israel. However, rather than turning Reid into Dutch security for further action, he was allowed to board the El Al flight by Israel's Shin Bet security so his movements during his five days in Israel could be monitored. Six months later, Reid attempted to ignite his shoe on the flight from Paris to Miami. Israel had not informed British, American, or any other security agency of the concerns about Reid. Reid's aunt, Claudette Lewis who raised Reid in south London, was quoted as saying she believed her nephew had been "brainwashed."

Reid later said El Al failed to detect that he had explosives in his shoes on the flight to Tel Aviv, an amazing revelation considering the Israeli airline's tight security.

You may also want to read about the strange history of El Al flight 1862, which crashed in 1992 after taking off from Schipol.


When Reid went on his next fateful trip -- the one where he tried to light his shoe -- he passed through a check from an Israeli-owned security service called ICTS. ICTS employs a large number of Shin Bet veterans and has strong links to Mossad.

All of which brings us back to Farouk and the Christmas event.

Most of the conspiracy-oriented websites are now claiming that ICTS ran security at Schiphol -- for example, see here. ICTS has offered this strong denial:

Following the terrorist attack on DL/NW Flight 253 on 25 December 2009 , there have been incorrect reports linking ICTS Europe to the event.

We would like to make it clear that ICTS Europe Holdings B.V. is not connected in any way to the mentioned events. ICTS Europe does not provide any security services, nor any other services, whether directly or indirectly, at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport and is not connected in any way to any of the companies that provide security services at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport.

The ICTS disclaimer offers a startling contrast to this PR announcement from January 14:

ICTS International N.V. (Nasdaq: ICTS) announced today that it has formed a partnership arrangement with ICTS Europe Holdings BV, an unaffiliated party, to provide security services at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in The Netherlands. The partnership named ICTS Netherlands Airport Services has been awarded two contracts having an aggregate value of $15,000,000 Euros a year or annually. The contracts are for three years and relate to two sections of the airport to provide security, employees, guards and control in the airport, establishing a central check point and security arrangements for airport employees and other related services.

And then we have this announcement (pdf) from 2008:

CTSN Netherlands, ICTS Europe subsidiary in The Netherlands, was awarded a new contract with OpenSkies airline, British Airways’ premium carrier subsidiary, to provide High risk security operation services supported by technology at Schiphol Airport.

Hm. Looks to me like we've caught ICTS in a clear fabrication. Their denial of involvement with Schiphol should be rated C for chutzpah.

Apparently, ICTS is attempting to rely on an old dodge: It was not ICTS but a subsidiary firm which did business at Schiphol. On the same company website where ICTS claimed to have nothing to do with Schipol, we read this:

Netherlands

CTSN BV

Folkstoneweg 42, Columbus Building
1118 LM Schiphol Airport
The Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 20 65 650
Fax: +31 20 20 65 659
E-mail: ctsn@ictseurope.com

Location: Amsterdam Schiphol Airport

For further confirmation, see the announcement here (pdf).

Incidentally, ICTS (through another subsidiary, named Huntleigh) also runs the security at Detroit airport.

And who runs security at the airport at Lagos International Airport, a.k.a. Murtala Muhammed International Airport, a.k.a. LOS? This is where Farouk flew out to Schiphol -- presumably wearing, even then, his PETN briefs. (Oddly, this airport was modeled after Schiphol.) Farouk went through two checks; KLM (the carrier) provided the second check, but I don't know who conducted the first one. Still another ICTS subsidiary -- MUSC -- provides maritime security services for the Nigerian government. Nigeria restored relations with Israel in 1992, after a 19 year break; some accounts hold that the two governments are now quite close.


I am not attempting to provide a simple one-size-fits-all conspiracy theory to explain all of these anomalies. Let me repeat: I do not have such a theory. Undoubtedly, many of these oddities will soon be explained.

Still, at present, we have some reasonable questions that demand answers. In particular, I'd like to know why ICTS lied. If the Israeli-run security firm had not denied the undeniable, the stories about that company would have stayed mired within the murky realms of the conspiracy blogs.

But now... Permalink

The new decade starts one full year from now. So the worst decade ever still has a chance to get even worse.

Happy New Year!

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