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Tag Archives: intelligence

Epistemological Khashoggi: A Kind of Poem

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Asia, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Middle East, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Politics, Saudi Arabia, Turkey

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Identity, intelligence, Jamal Kashoggi, political spychology, Saudi Arabia, Turkish McCarthy

“Indeed, it would appear Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance, flight, or murder has become a matter most delicate, most intriguing, most opaque.”


Epistemological Khashoggi

Things we know.
Things we don’t know.
Things we don’t know we don’t know.
Things we don’t want to know.
Things we will never know.
Thing we know but don’t know that we know.
Things we don’t know but fervently believe.
Finally
Things we would like to find out.


One of the 15 suspects in the death of dissident Jamal Khashoggi dressed up in his clothes and was caught on surveillance cameras walking around Istanbul on the day Khashoggi went missing.

Footage being used as part of the Turkish government’s investigation into Khashoggi’s death was shared with CNN, and shows the man, identified as Mustafa al-Madani, leaving Saudi Arabia’s consulate through the back door wearing Khashoggi’s clothes, a fake beard, and glasses, a senior Turkish official told CNN.

Caralle, Katelyn. “After Jamal Khashoggi disappeared, a Saudi agent left the compound in his clothes.” Washington Examiner, October 22, 2018.


Were they really Jamal Khashoggi’s clothes?

Even so, what has happened to other potential evidence of murder?

Above all: where is the body?


A man in a foreign land leaves his fiancee (of another nationalist) parked by the curb, walks into his nation’s embassy to obtain a permit for marriage and fails to walk back out to drive off into the sunset with his presumed beloved.

Missing: the body.

Also missing: blood spatter; the odor of disinfectant; the appearance of discarded  . . . anything: clothing; a table or parts of one involved in a murder; not even a shoelace, much less a pair of shoes, has been shown to the public.

Also for public notice: embassies are considered a part of the sovereign territory of the state represented: what have the Turks been doing (directly) in the Saudi’s building?

Everyone knows the answer to that question — one good reason for the invention of the “Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF)” within buildings intent on defending the most private and sensitive of conversations.

Bold added:

Erdogan called on the perpetrators to be brought to justice in Istanbul and questioned whether the Vienna Conventions, which give immunity to diplomatic staff, applied in this case.

It was the first time that any official in Turkey has publicly outlined the Turkish contention that Khashoggi was killed by a hit squad sent from Saudi Arabia. But while Erdogan had promised the “naked truth,” he offered few details beyond those revealed by Turkish officials speaking privately.

Tuysuz, Gul and Eliza Mackintosh. “Erdogan says Khashoggi was victime of ‘ferocious’ pre-planned murder.” CNN, October 23, 2018.

Perhaps when Jamal Khashoggi left his fiance waiting at the curb, he had cause for wanting to leave . . . everything — and become a new man.

Perhaps a body will turn up.

Perhaps we will hear a recording or be subject inferential visual data.

However, the public may be left with an impossible question: whose data — whose story — should it adopt as true?


Related Online

Gall, Carlotta. “Security Images Show Khashoggi and Fiancee in His Final Hours.” The New York Times, October 22, 2018.

Perper, Rosie. “Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée wrote a touching tribute for him on Twitter hours after Saudi authorities confirmed his death.” Business Insider, October 21, 2018.

But officials are skeptical of Saudi’s explanation for the Khashoggi’s death. Turkish officials have repeatedly touted claims that Khashoggi was brutally tortured and dismembered by what appeared to be a 15-person kill squad flown in from Saudi Arabia.


Where are the bones? The clothes? The “body bag”? Was there a sink? A plastic or porcelain tub? Where are the clothes of the killers? Where was the fire and smoke needed to burn things that burn? Where are his shoelaces and their plastic tips (if of common construction)? No nails? No hair follicles?


O’Connor, Tom. “Saudi Arabia Fires Intelligence Officials, Blames Them for Khashoggi Death.” Newsweek, October 19, 2018.


After his transforming Turkey into a family enterprise, what motive has anyone from the post-Enlightenment west for believing the presentations of President Erdogan?

In Sum

Where is the body?

Where, in fact, is the story?

BackChannels may suggest that the Saudi confession to murder should have been accompanied immediately by its evidence.  Today, the lag in time between the confession and the turning up of evidence — so late as to make fabrication possible — may make the confession suspect.

The time may be running out for even the telling of an untimely untruth.

Indeed, it would appear Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance, flight, or murder has become a matter most delicate, most intriguing, most opaque.


Breaking Online

Haaretz. “Report: Saudi Journalist Khashoggi’s Remains Found.” October 23, 2018:

Multiple sources suggested Khashoggi had been cut up and his face “disfigured,” Sky News reported.

Sources in the Istanbul Prosecutor’s office denied that Khashoggi’s remains were found at the consul general’s home, adding that a picture on social media purportedly showing the corpse is fake.


Haaretz and Reuters. “Explained Turkey Takes Aim at MBS: What’s Driving Erdogan in the Khashoggi Scandal.” Haaretz, October 23, 2018.


BackChannels will try to stop at this point: where is the body?  Is a body found really the body?  If a man wished to leave his body, loosely speaking, would he also not leave behind his old clothes?

There is no way to address such questions from an armchair or by watching television.

That may not be the problem — so the man is dead or, perhaps, on his way to early skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps (never let it be said the editor of this blog has not been a foolish romantic); what is the problem is that “the public” — or respective national publics or statistical clumps of national or party identity — may lose its basis for believing anything from any source.

What then?

What now?


Update: October 24, 2018

Kobrin, Nancy Hartevelt.  “Why the Saudis Had to Cut Up Khashoggi’s Body.”  Clarion Project, October 24, 2018.

Gruesome, brazen and barbaric were some of the terms that were thrown around in response to learning his fingers were cut off first, then his head and finally his body was chopped into small pieces in order to “disappear” it from the crime scene.

Images of such a sadistic act were the linchpin in inciting the political debacle. Yet, since the remains of Khashoggi’s body had not been found yet, it also served to precipitate a war over who controlled the narrative. With this “memory” destroyed, who owned the truth?


–33–

Also in Media: “LIVE STREAM: House Open Hearing w/ FBI’s James Comey On Trump & Clinton Russia 2016 Election Hacking” | Live at Posting

20 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Spychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

House Open Hearing, intelligence, intelligence community, national security, United States

Posted by President Trump Live Speech and Press Conference


Related:

As you will see during our hearing, Mr. President, there is no evidence Mr. Obama tapped your phones. This is what is called "fiction."

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) March 20, 2017

Rep. Schiff spoke both points in session.


Also regarding President Trump’s assertion of Obama Administration wiretapping, FBI Director Comey reports, “The Department has no information that supports those tweets.”

Related: http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/20/politics/comey-hearing-russia-wiretapping/index.html – “Comey confirms FBI investigating Russia, Trump ties” (Stephen Collinson).

Related on BackChannels to “east-west-” Russo-American political relations: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/03/11/reflexive-control-process-allahu-akbar-terrorism-new-nationalism-neo-feudalism/

——

Re. Roger Stone, Paul Manfort: https://www.rawstory.com/2017/03/former-top-trump-aides-roger-stone-and-paul-manafort-both-wanted-for-questioning-in-russia-investigations/ 3/19/2017



Reference

“FISA 702”.  U. S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

v

–33–

Also in Media: Czech intelligence alarmed by Russian ‘threat’

05 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eastern Europe, Political Spychology, Russia

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

counter-intelligence, Czech Republic, disinformation, information control, information warfare, intelligence, political influence, Russia

“Intelligence officers under diplomatic cover were active also at the embassies of other states; however, the number of Russian intelligence officials was much higher. Unlike intelligence officials of partner states, Russian (and some other) intelligence officers did not declare their status to the BIS”, it added.“Such clandestine behaviour, concealing the affiliation to an intelligence service, clearly signals activities threatening the security and other interests of the Czech Republic”.

Read more at Czech intelligence alarmed by Russian ‘threat’, EUObserver, September 2, 2016.

–33–

Dicks and Spooks – Books

01 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by commart in Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Spychology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

intelligence, politics

Quite slowly but with method, the library takes shape within the mansion within the cottage inside an apartment out in the countryside about one mountain beyond the Washington area.

Probably, the shelves should be alphabetized rather than categorized, but that would be a registry, not a library: a library has sections and themes, visual appeal and both mysterious and promising atmospheres — there are whole shelves here filled with Le Carre (all of his books) and Peter Mayle — but as regards this blog, certain aspects of the collection emerge in relation to “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”.

“Dicks and Spooks”?

Detectives and spies, intelligence organizations and operations, their marks: mafia and political criminals.

The section is small.  Even so, two of the list have not been read, one for boredom (“MI6” risks becoming a doorstop), the other — it’s not its time yet.

Titles as readable as they may be intriguing: The Good Spy, The Zhivago Affair, and Mafioso.

There’s relevant library on the Kindle as well — e.g., Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing — but I don’t even want to light up that screen or find out what Amazon has to say about me: The Book remains the Friend in the Library, spine out, ever present, ever ready to be read and to be read again on bed or sofa, or, God forbid it (which uttered objection is certain to bring about the same), at the table with coffee, note cards, and pens at the ready.

Inventory in “Dicks and Spooks” just noted:

Bird, Kai.  The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames.  New York: Crown Publishers, 2014.

Finn, Peter and Petra Couvee.  The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book.  New York: Pantheon Books, 2014.

Jeffery, Keith.  The Secret History of MI6.  New York: The Penguin Press, 2010.

Servadio, Gaia. Mafioso.  New York: Stein and Day, 1976.

Trento, Joseph J.  The Secret History of the CIA.  Roseville, California: Prima, 2001

All of the above solopsistic discussion for five books (of more than two thousand) . . . .  Still, one of five of two thousand just might appeal to the reader.

# # #

Comment on the Missing Armies of the Muddled

10 Sunday Aug 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

intelligence, Islamic Small Wars, ISW, military, political moderates

Obama has given MB plenty of room for operating and for being observed. As he is not a President for Life, the stronger elements that comprise our government will survive him and probably be able to use the knowledge gained during his tenure. I would fear as much a flip toward the extreme Right in America. We really need a central, progressive, and prudent politics, and the zealots in politics have really skewed the conversation away from the middle ranks. That needs fixing, so I am becoming a Passionate Moderate Liberal.

The above comes not from The Awesome Conversation but rather from private correspondence.

As with the polarizing of American politics, which so far remain civil, a glance at the hot conflicts within the Islamic Small Wars campus tell a tale about the possession of armies in the name of the people: Syria just didn’t have one.

Bashar the Butcher al-Assad had an army.

Every band of mixed pedigree with heavy jihad on its mind made itself an army.

The greater portion of the population of Syria, which numbers above six million internally displace and refugee: no army — no defense — nothing against the state’s military power or the ruthless ambition of spoilers ambitious for plunder, rape, and rapine beneath their black banners.

*

Iraq appeared to have had an army before ISIS bore down on it and got it to jump out of its boots and uniforms, so it may be said that moderate Sunnis, Chaldean Christians, and the Yezedis also had no more army in Iraq than they would have had in Syria.

To its credit plus the rightful defensive stance of Shiites looking north toward Sunni extremists, it might be said that Baghdad, finally, has an army, and it’s moving but with the pace known to other armies challenged by Islamist irregulars.  Even with an army formed to defend the middle humanity of a state, the same would seem to need an army of detectives to deal with the state’s major irritants.

# # #

Nigerians – Dead, Maimed, Refugee – Again – Boco Loco In Dark Space

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by commart in Africa, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Nigeria, Regions

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

commentary, defense, intelligence, Nigeria, political, politics, terrorism

It is a co-ed school about 45 miles south of Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, and difficult to communicate with because extremists last year destroyed the cell phone tower there.

Islamist group slaughters 43 children in Nigerian boarding school | Mail Online – 2/25/2014.

“Dark space” has nothing to do with color, race, creed, religion: it has to do with communicating and policing.

Any location without reliable 24/7 cellular communication becomes an easy target for marauders — and these most barbaric and sadist of Muslims, so they claim that status for themselves, prove the worst of marauding gangs.

Reactive tactics and strategies fail just as reliably as cell service.

Show business — shows of force, state public relations — won’t work either, and so far plainly hasn’t.

*

But, how do we encourage security agencies that refuse to use intelligence information sent to them by citizens or fail to coordinate intelligence information from various security outfits and government agencies?

Recently, a fellow gave sensitive information to a policeman on some suspicious activities within his workplace but the policeman waved it aside that even if he tells his boss, the officer will not trust his information or may accuse him of belonging to Boko Haram. Now how do we encourage the government or security services when a junior policeman does not have confidence in his superior officer?

Opinion: Nigerian security agencies and the fight against Boko Haram | – 1/24/2014.

Nigeria’s army may be brave, but as much as it may request weapons, what it needs most is a locked tight loyal intelligence service, one capable of tracing financing and arms sales, detecting related cabal and traffic in planning, and knowing, not guessing, where its enemy wanders.

*

In the backs-of-beyond, whether the remote corners of Columbia-Ecuador, the Durand Line separating Afghanistan from Pakistan, or the remote villages of Nigeria, producing structural changes may prove the most expensive but necessary response to a force now roaming and killing at will: cell systems, forts, roads, helicopter pads, airfields — all of it: and then, as too often demonstrated in Pakistan, mere police, even a barracks full of them, simply will not stand off a force superior in numbers for the 30- to 45-minutes it may take to lose a firefight while waiting for “backup”.

Opposite that tack: as refugees spill in from affected areas, they are doing defense naturally: fleeing the death for the safety of great numbers and improved state response to attack.

*

Boko Haram are better armed and are better motivated than our own troops.

Boko Haram and a Nation at War, Articles | THISDAY LIVE – 2/20/2014.

*

“It would appear that they have established bases in certain parts of the northeast that nobody can even penetrate or go to, and they’ve excluded every symbol of authority in those areas,” he said. “Some even say they are in control of various local governments in the northeast and are collecting taxes and running the show in those places.”

Boko Haram’s Funding Remains ‘Elusive’ – 5/22/2013.

* * *

BBC News – Nigeria school raid in Yobe state ‘leaves dozens dead’

Muslim group slaughters 43 children in Nigerian school, children burned alive, Jihadists shot and slit the throats of children who tried to escape through the windows | Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugs

Thousands fleeing Boko Haram find little comfort in Niger | Reuters

29 Boys Killed as Boko Haram Attacks Boarding School in Nigeria – NBC News.com

* * *

“Boko Haram came in at about 4.00 a.m. (0300 GMT), just when we were getting ready for the morning prayers,” said Bama resident Abba Masta, who lives near the palace.

“There was shooting everywhere and they set the palace on fire. Many died. Students had to run for their lives as they attacked the government girls college as well.”

It was one of several deadly attacks this week.

Boko Haram fighters kill 47 in attack in northeast Nigeria -police | The Indian Express – 2/20/2014.

Related: NCTC.gov – 2014 Counterterrorism Calendar, n.d.

When a government asks “Islamists” to lay down their arms (say “Pretty Please”?), it may do so with faith in reason, but better with these to have faith in the savagery that drives and the greed and lust that ensures their continued swimming in blood and money.

# # #

FTAC – An Observation on Citizen Action and the Federal Domestic Security Disconnect

30 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by commart in Islamic Small Wars, Political Spychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

citizen's journalism, domestic security, intelligence, open source intelligence, terrorism, USA

You don’t know you don’t know.

Landmark Education Forum – YouTube – 6/30/2012

Landmark, to which I obtained an introduction, no more than that, many years ago provides encouragement and language for “breakthrough” thinking, part of which rightly involves thinking beyond what one knows one doesn’t know (for that, we have search engines) and getting on to things of which we are not aware (we don’t know what we don’t know).

Today, a web search of the statement “You don’t know what you don’t know” brings up a raft of similar applications by other entities and for many purposes.  The jargon has become a part of the pursuit of a spacious perspicacity.

______

This day started with correspondence and with it the opportunity to recap some thoughts about the Obama Administration’s stance as regards al-Qaeda, domestic terrorism, and the Muslim Brotherhood, ever subjects of interest to Jihad and anti-Jihad elements alike.  The note touches on not only the relative invisibility of the American intelligence industry — what kind of industry would it be if it were all open on the table as Snowdenhood would have it? — and it’s thin but present barrier with those involved, inadvertently or deliberately, as friendly or unfriendly, in the “open source intelligence” community, i.e., the community looking things up on the Internet plus, perhaps, the community of journalists poking and prodding cultural and social reality from some stance (friendly or unfriendly) of their own.  Herewith:

X.,

The problem with speculation is that it has spectrum even, as with you, if the guesswork is as educated and informed as it may be.

When Obama took office, he was careful to minimize the scope of work as regards the Islamic Small Wars. He left the Brotherhood as a wandering cloud and pinpointed Osama and the southeast Asian Jihad as a target American and NATO troops plus our military and state security resources could manage. As you may recall, I call that stance the pursuit of the least war possible, not an imprudent position given the costs (in blood and treasure) involved in the way WE conduct war.

Blood and weapons seem cheaper by far on the other side by measure of the other side’s own behavior.

In our internal security, the flow down from the Presidential mind seems to have been to similarly restrict the scope of operations to arrest (first) and interdict (as we get better at machine sifting human signal); That’s where the system breaks down before human language-borne illusion and will. Relying on our principles, we will allow, even encourage, Muslims to do as everyone else does, including setting up mosques without restriction and proselytizing like the most ambitious bible thumpers, but we will not allow them to conspire, commit, or incite crime (not any more than we would anyone else).

That’s how we do things here.

Nonetheless, as domestic terrorism is a fact of life, and association with a large contribution from Islamic Jihad undeniable, and absurd when it is denied (Little Rock, Fort Hood, Boston, yadayada): So how to lay a trap for those who would smile to the country’s face while preparing to stab it in the back?

Watch what it does, what it says, and where it goes and try to reduce behaviors attending conspiracy, incitement, and the setting out to do violence to some package that can be policed without nulling the express rights, traditions, and privileges of other Americans, including Muslims not involved with such criminal dreaming, scheming, and planning.

What we do for one, we must do for all, for here all are equal under the law.

Missing at this level of “competition” on the domestic front: we have nothing in place — no laws — speaking to sedition or the detention of persons of interest, which might as well include you or I or any number of other Americans involved on any side of the Islamic Small Wars.

Your complaint is predicated on knowing what you know and not seeing what you know reflected elsewhere.

While you rightly ask what America is getting for its $52 billion annual combined agency and services intelligence bill, you and most others — perhaps with the exception of benighted Snowdens — cannot see the traffic moving behind the walls defined by the possession of secret clearance within a relevant agency or operation. I / you / we / and most don’t know what the secrets-keeping intelligence and security sectors of the Federal government knows.

When we guess, our personalities as much or more than empirical observation and reason, contribute to our theories.

To reduce this to “takeaway”: I think, best case, President Obama has pursued with the endorsements of Party and general election, the least war possible as regards engagement with Islamist ambition or programming and its various hidden as well as large (e.g., Russia-Syria-Iran) entities.

We know the Federal government wants to interdict Boston Marathon Bombings but seems to have some problem coordinating, investigating, or stopping that activity. The worst explanation: some idiot with a scientific mind wants the end point! A complete(d) story. The best, which is not so good: our domestic security apparatus is a gangly beast with many heads and hundreds of hands and it is incapable of rising to any occasion, like the threat of the Boston Marathon Bombing, “as one man”.

*

The route of a high-ranking mosque official: awful.

For the years in service at and the relationships formed and cherished by his congregation, there’s no good explanation for the fast night flight (symbolically so) out and the lack of then immediate transitional communication with the organization’s membership.

However, the Federal government has every right and imperative to treat that event as an internal matter, privileged and private, also confined to the organization, and not a matter of public concern, at least where the Federal public presence may be concerned.

In the secret life of the Federal government, all permutations of two guesses are good: it’s helping the Muslim Brotherhood in America vs. it’s investigating the Muslim Brotherhood in America.

The talk around that makes for lively but unresolvable argument.

# # #

FTAC – In Correspondence – Some Thoughts About U.S. Intelligence and the Tsarnaev Brothers

12 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Spychology, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

detention, intelligence, interdiction, politics, terrorism, Tsarnaev

The prompt: ” . . . what $52 billion in “intelligence” does not buy: the ability to deny men such as the Tsarnaev brothers their platform for an attack.”

______

T.,

I’m starting to think these attacks are wanted to provide the engineering mindset with an end-point to process-based analysis. To analyze a path toward a crime, one might want to have the crime at hand for reverse engineering. Some things we catch up with, so one may not be able to shop up and store, say, 500 pounds of fertilizer without a clear and verifiable purpose associated with it, and other things, especially having to do with the life of the mind, afford deeper complexity (requiring large outlays for computer-based data capture and linguistic and pattern analysis).

Another facet: our military repeatedly purchases the last war.

If the last war was WWII, we want greater and more ships, aircraft, tanks, and conventional weapons defense and delivery systems: we’re buying for the same war, only larger.

In the post-Vietnam era, so one may imagine, investment in LIC, intelligence, public information channels, comes more to the forefront of concern — and we reduce the quantity of ships in the Navy while maintaining, somewhat, preparedness for a scenario still akin to conventional global war.

It’s not one or the other, of course, but a broad war fighting spectrum that nonetheless responds to the latest insult or exigency.

As you have noted, the posture remains reactive, “following the snake”.

Our intelligence industry may operate similarly as a bureaucracy posed against similar enemy state-based bureaucracies: it’s better prepared for analyzing the Khamenei regime’s plans and possibly tracking into Hezbollah global than it is with dealing with nutty non-state actors who build bombs on their kitchen tables without taking direct orders from on high.

In the past, when the fighting has either involved or wound down to anarchists and bandits, it’s very small and the casualties turn up limited and small too. However, armies of one or two armed with advanced small arms and improvised devices have a level of potency far in excess of what they would have in earlier days. Moreover, the economic, political, and social value of the victims of their evil has risen similarly: the low-educated, low-wage worker with or without family has been matched or overshadowed in incidence by highly-educated and skilled multitasking and wealth producing men and women with complex integration with family and society. Consider the value (cultural, economic, social) of the Tsarnaev brothers, college students with a malicious bent, in light of those they killed or maimed. One may NOW (instead of yesterday) expect our intelligence industry to tackle the problem of who may be building a bomb in the kitchen.

In that Bledsoe, Hassan, and the Tsarnaevs sent up caution flags bright enough for warning and watching and then got through suggests some pattern of watch-and-wait (until somebody dies at their hands).

As noted years ago, this brings up the subject of whether Americans should have to contend with detentions without charge.

* * *

Goading a greater power into overreaction seems a well-enough established ploy in politics and war. It’s played against Israel every day with rocket launches from Gaza and attempts to perpetrate a terrorist acts from the west bank. It could play here as well with increased tempo in lone-gunman attacks. While we may wait for that stimulus to appear, one may only suppose our $52 billion annual spy budget pays some attention to the intellectual path taken by Muslim garage punks toward their appearance as marathon bombers.

When should the Feds have intervened and on what basis or evidence?

I wonder if deteriorating relations with Russia played into the Boston Marathon bombing. Putin and the new oligarchs have been handed a gift with global Islamic terrorism because they can do their thing in the background while promoting and cooperating within the anti-Jihad framework.

______

And while making it look like the United States is the party falling down.

The topic would not be in correspondence if Carl Bledsoe, Nidal Malik Hasan, and the Tsarnaev brothers hadn’t been somewhere on the domestic and international security radars prior to committing their crimes.  Each was a suspected quantity or an officially tracked one known to one intelligence organization or another or to military personnel.  Failure to signal or act — silence and watching — enabled them.

Obama said that “the pressure we put on al Qaeda and other networks that are well financed and more sophisticated” has pushed potential terrorists to the margins, where they are forced to plot smaller-level attacks that are tougher to track.

Obama warns of challenge in tracking lone wolf terrorists | TheHill – 4/30/2013.

Have things changed?

How would we know?

In defense of multiple Administrations in Washington, D.C., one might suggest that empirical approaches to any emergent threat scenario wants for a multidimensional approach — examination of the political, psychological, linguistic, social, and behavioral predicates.

It may not be too much to look into patterns in consumer purchases (potential procurement receipts) in the search for predictive data.

However, as suggested by the shared correspondence, the discovery of such a relationship may correspond only to the last thing that happened, not the next thing that’s Out There.

Also, this theme may get into more than the latent fears the American rugged individualist has toward the Federal “Big Brother” — I was surprised — only momentarily 🙂 — to receive on the look-up of “terrorism law fertilizer” (close enough) this link: West Fertilizer Violated Federal Anti-Terror Regulations – Lawyers, Guns & Money : Lawyers, Guns & Money – 4/21/2013.

I generally maintain that rough observable behavior — like the purchase of a large quantity of fertilizer by other than a trusted farmer — is far easier to track than individual thought and, when shared, cabal and conspiracy, which best armor is always privacy guarded by silence.

# # #

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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