Category: Terrorism

Crap! I Guess that I’m Actually Watch this Damn Film Now

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For the 2nd time in my life,* threats of terrorism have pulled a major motion picture from release.

I guess that I

This time it’s for the James Franco and Seth Rogen farce The Interview that has been pulled from screens:

Sony Pictures Entertainment on Wednesday dropped plans for its Christmas Day release of “The Interview,” a movie that depicts the assassination of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, after receiving a terror threat against theaters.

 Before that, the four largest theater chains in the United States said they would not show the movie, which has been at the center of a devastating hacking attack on Sony over the last several weeks. In a statement, Sony said: “We respect and understand our partners’ decision and, of course, completely share their paramount interest in the safety of employees and theatergoers.”

 Sony Pictures Entertainment on Wednesday dropped plans for its Christmas Day release of “The Interview,” a movie that depicts the assassination of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, after receiving a terror threat against theaters.

 Before that, the four largest theater chains in the United States said they would not show the movie, which has been at the center of a devastating hacking attack on Sony over the last several weeks. In a statement, Sony said: “We respect and understand our partners’ decision and, of course, completely share their paramount interest in the safety of employees and theatergoers.”

Hollywood executives never miss a chance to choose the craven path, I guess.

In a development that should surprise no one, “Senior Administration Officials” have confirmed that the hack originated in the DPRK.

BTW, James Franco had the best tweet about the cancellation:

#Emmastone kills it in @cabaret!!!! #alancumming is so good I started smoking and slapped his ass. 🌲🌲❤️Bye NYC!❤️🌲🌲
— James Franco (@JamesFrancoTV) December 17, 2014

That is so cool.

For the irony impaired, he tweeted this after the film was puled, and he says nothing at all about this.

Epically cool!

*The first time was when the film Mohammad, Messenger of God was pulled as a result of the 1977 Hanafi Siege, where hostages were taken in Washington, DC.

Sydney? Seriously?

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I have to say that if terrorists were going to make an attack, Sydney, Australia would be the last place that I would expect:

At least one gunman is holding staff and customers hostage at a cafe in the Australian city of Sydney.

Hundreds of armed police have sealed off the normally busy Martin Place in the central business district.

Earlier, at least three people were seen inside the Lindt cafe with their hands up against a window, and holding up a black flag with Arabic writing.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has described the “terrifying” incident as “deeply concerning”.

It is not yet confirmed as a terrorist attack, though the fact that the hostage takers appeared to have displayed the black Jihadi flag would imply that this is likely.

It’s just plain weird.

Israel’s Right Wing Christian “Allies” are a Bigger Threat to them than Hamas

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Case in point, one Adam Everett Livvix,* who was indicted for plotting to blow up Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem:

The Israel Police and Shin Bet Security Service released information on Tuesday regarding a Christian American citizen arrested on suspicion of planning a terror attack on Muslim holy sites in Israel.

According to Shin Bet and Israel Police reports, the suspect is Adam Everett Livvix, a 30-year-old from Texas. Livvix has previously been wanted in the U.S. on drug charges. He was arrested in Israel on November 19, on suspicion of possession of illegal weapons and planning a terror attack.

According to the Shin Bet, Livvix, while residing in the Palestinian territories prior to his arrest, was approached about assassinating U.S. President Barack Obama while the latter was visiting Israel, though the suspect refused to take part in the plan.

Livvix came to Israel in 2013 and lived in the Palestinian cities of Hebron and Bethlehem. It was while living in Bethlehem that Livvix was approached by a Palestinian about assassinating Obama the with a sniper rifle. Livvix refused. After leaving Palestinian Authority territory, Livvix entered Israel illegally, and remained in the country illegally for roughly a year and a half.

Livvix became acquainted with Israelis and presented himself as a former U.S. Navy SEAL. During questioning, Livvix admitted to being involved in various fraud schemes, as well as the initial stages of planning terror attacks on sites holy to Islam in Israel.

He was apprehended in possession of various weapons and explosives that were stolen from the Israel Defense Forces. In October of this year Livvix asked his roommate, an IDF soldier, to procure weapons for him in exchange for money. His roommate managed to bring him a 1.4 kilogram explosive device, for which Livvix paid part of the agreed upon sum.

The American Federal Bureau of Investigation was notified of the investigation by Israeli security services, and the Central District Prosecutor filed an indictment against Livix in the Netanya Magistrate’s Court. On Monday, the court ordered that Livvix be held until the end of legal proceedings, and that he undergo psychiatric evaluation as per the request of his defense attorney.

The Israel Police and the Justice Ministry stated that the suspect attempted to flee when he was apprehended by police, by jumping out of his seventh-floor window onto a sixth-floor balcony.

Livvix’s indictment comes at a time of rising tensions in Jerusalem, mostly over a disputed holy site that is holy both to Muslims and Jews.

You know, the Rapture Ready™ crowd literally expects the Jews of the world to burn in hellfire so that they can float up to heaven like a bunch of helium filled sex dolls.

That’s why they do sh%$ like this.  They literally want to hasten the end of the world.

Can you imagine the sh%$-storm that would have come down if he had succeeded in blowing up a bomb on the Temple Mount?

He wouldn’t care.  Anything bad that happens to people in Israel is just collateral camage to their warped theology.

BTW, in addition to everything else, it appears that this guy is a seriously bent piece of work.

*Why do all these guys always go by three names from anyway?

Finally, Someone Calls Out the House of Saud………

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Unfortunately, it’s the New Statesman, a respected but obscure publication, founded by Fabian Socialists and generally affiliated with the Labour Party, which has finally observed that Riyadh is the font from which Islamic terrorism springs:

Although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century.

………

As the so-called Islamic State demolishes nation states set up by the Europeans almost a century ago, IS’s obscene savagery seems to epitomise the violence that many believe to be inherent in religion in general and Islam in particular. It also suggests that the neoconservative ideology that inspired the Iraq war was delusory, since it assumed that the liberal nation state was an inevitable outcome of modernity and that, once Saddam’s dictatorship had gone, Iraq could not fail to become a western-style democracy. Instead, IS, which was born in the Iraq war and is intent on restoring the premodern autocracy of the caliphate, seems to be reverting to barbarism. On 16 November, the militants released a video showing that they had beheaded a fifth western hostage, the American aid worker Peter Kassig, as well as several captured Syrian soldiers. Some will see the group’s ferocious irredentism as proof of Islam’s chronic inability to embrace modern values.

Yet although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century. In July 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism, and yet the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, condemning IS in the strongest terms, has insisted that “the ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way”. Other members of the Saudi ruling class, however, look more kindly on the movement, applauding its staunch opposition to Shiaism and for its Salafi piety, its adherence to the original practices of Islam. This inconsistency is a salutary reminder of the impossibility of making accurate generalisations about any religious tradition. In its short history, Wahhabism has developed at least two distinct forms, each of which has a wholly different take on violence.

………

The soaring oil price created by the 1973 embargo – when Arab petroleum producers cut off supplies to the US to protest against the Americans’ military support for Israel – gave the kingdom all the petrodollars it needed to export its idiosyncratic form of Islam. The old military jihad to spread the faith was now replaced by a cultural offensive. The Saudi-based Muslim World League opened offices in every region inhabited by Muslims, and the Saudi ministry of religion printed and distributed Wahhabi translations of the Quran, Wahhabi doctrinal texts and the writings of modern thinkers whom the Saudis found congenial, such as Sayyids Abul-A’la Maududi and Qutb, to Muslim communities throughout the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, the United States and Europe. In all these places, they funded the building of Saudi-style mosques with Wahhabi preachers and established madrasas that provided free education for the poor, with, of course, a Wahhabi curriculum. At the same time, young men from the poorer Muslim countries, such as Egypt and Pakistan, who had felt compelled to find work in the Gulf to support their families, associated their relative affluence with Wahhabism and brought this faith back home with them, living in new neighbourhoods with Saudi mosques and shopping malls that segregated the sexes. The Saudis demanded religious conformity in return for their munificence, so Wahhabi rejection of all other forms of Islam as well as other faiths would reach as deeply into Bradford, England, and Buffalo, New York, as into Pakistan, Jordan or Syria: everywhere gravely undermining Islam’s traditional pluralism.

It provides a lot of insights into forces like Al Qaeda and ISIS, and makes it clear that the House of Saud, and that regime’s use of religion as a way to exert control and to promulgate a millennia long conflict between Arabs and Persians.

Saudi Arabia cannot be a part of any solution until they are forced to face the fact that they are the source of the problem.

Since ISIS was Created by Efforts to Overthrow Bashar al-Assad, It Follows that Fighting ISIS Might Involve Eschewing the Goals to Overthrow Bashar al-Assad

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One of the realities that is studiously ignored in the west is that the Syrian civil war has its roots in efforts by the Gulf monarchies to overthrow the Damascus regime.

These efforts sowed misery throughout the region, and boosted Salafist militias through the area.

Another reality being studiously ignored is that ISIS was, until recently, the private military of the House of Saud, assembled by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then head of the Saudi intelligence agency.

It comes as no surprise that it appears that people are discovering that fighting ISIS is incompatible with the immediate overthrow of the Baathist regime in Syria:

The Obama administration, as I wrote last week, has at least a hypothetical way forward in Iraq, but not in Syria, which it is currently treating as the rear sanctuary for Islamic State (IS) forces besieging Iraq. By the time its long-term plan to train insurgents to fight both IS and the regime of President Bashar al-Assad reaches fruition, there may be very little Syria left to save. Even that’s assuming that the administration takes its own plan seriously, which past history suggests it will not.

What, then, can be done — by anyone — to turn off the Syrian meat grinder?

Last week, David Ignatius of the Washington Post wrote about a leaked document proposing a set of local cease-fires between Syrian rebels and the regime that might ultimately lead to a process of political reconciliation. The column whipped up a tornado of speculation in the very small world of Syria experts. That, in turn, led David Harland, the head of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD), the Geneva-based organization responsible for the document, to produce a finished report outlining the proposal and then to send it to me. The document remains private, so I can’t link to it, but I can quote from it. The argument it makes must be taken seriously by anyone who cares about Syria.

………

The premise of the HD report, titled “Steps to Settle the Syrian Conflict,” is that neither the regime nor the rebels are capable of defeating the other. The savage stalemate creates conditions in which both IS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the local al Qaeda offshoot, can thrive. Worse, the haplessness of mainstream insurgent groups has “radicalized and salafized” the rank and file, who are increasingly joining the jihadists. With the rout last week of American-backed brigades in the western city of Idlib, non-jihadi rebels are in danger of becoming a marginal force in Syria. At the same time, the Syrian state — which is now functional, but not much more, across much of the country — is coming ever closer to collapse. As the state grows weaker, criminal elements and militias grow ever stronger, while IS and al-Nusra fill the vacuum of governance. Syria could collapse into Somalia. There is an urgent need to preserve the state, so the argument goes, even if that also means keeping Assad in power. “Better to have a regime and a state than not to have a state,” as Harland pithily puts it.

I see any action that can be seen as a big f%$# you to the House of Saud as an independent good, so I am not an unbiased source, but I do think that this is the reality here.

This is the 2nd 911 Joke that I’ve Heard

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And I made the first one a few years back, and it wasn’t that good.

Well, Chris Rock hits it out of the park:

On the eve of the New York City Marathon, “Saturday Night Live” host Chris Rock opened his monologue with jokes about last year’s Boston Marathon bombings. Too soon? Well, the joke was pretty tame, all things considered. But that was just the warm-up for Rock’s main riff on the Freedom Tower, the new One World Trade Center building that’s now America’s tallest skyscraper. He went there — to the 9/11 joke.

“What were they thinking?” Rock demanded with trademark incredulity. “What kind of arrogant Floyd Mayweather crap is this?” then “Who’s the corporate sponsor, Target?

It’s really funny.

Eric Arthur Blair* Would be Appalled

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At the Guantanamo show trials, defense attorneys are being asked to respond to motions that they are not allowed to read:

Despite enormous logistical and legal hurdles, defense attorneys for high value detainees at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison, say they press on for the judgment of history, if not for a fair turn before the embattled military commissions that substitute for trials in federal court.

 Attorneys for alleged 9/11 attack planners Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) and Ramzi Bin al-Shibh and alleged USS Cole bombing plotter Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri described their challenges to an audience gathered by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School in Manhattan on Wednesday night.

 Even though all the defense attorneys are vetted and cleared to access Top Secret documents, they agree that secrecy remains the root of most delays and dysfunction.

 “If you sat down to design a system and said, ‘I want to create a legal system where everything will move slowly, glacially,’ you would design this,” said Richard Kammen, who represents al-Nashiri. For example, if Kammen, who is based in Indianapolis, wants to read a classified court document, he must travel to a secure facility in Washington, D.C. to do so. Once, Kammen said, he was ordered to respond to motions he was not allowed to read.

 Even when the attorneys are at Guantanamo to meet in person with their clients, a detainee’s own words are considered secret.

 “We were told that anything that came out of client’s mouths were considered to be ‘presumptively classified,’” said Jason Wright, who represented KSM until this August. “This phrase ‘presumptive classification’ is something that has never existed before in the laws of the United States.”

 To make sure he understood, Wright, a former Army JAG, received a power point presentation at Guantanamo.

 “I had a briefer who told me, when you meet with your high value detainee, you have to treat everything that he says as presumptively classified – every word, every utterance, every gesture,” Wright recalled.

 “I said, ‘Hypothetically, what if he told me he liked peanut butter sandwiches? Is that classified?’”

 “Yes,” he was told.

(emphasis mine)

This is a blot on American jurisprudence and the rule of law.

It is lawless, uncivilized, and cowardly.

*George Orwell’s real name.

It Appears that Our Canadian Terrorists Weren’t

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Terrorists, I mean.  They were Canadians.

What they were was seriously mentally ill, and rather unsurprisingly, they were attracted to the batsh%$ insane world view of ISIS an their ilk.

The one that shot up the parliament?  He attempted to rob McDonalds with a pointed stick because he wanted to go to jail:

Ottawa shooter Michael Zehaf-Bibeau attempted to confess to a historical armed robbery that the RCMP believed didn’t happen, then attempted an armed robbery at a McDonald’s to go to jail, court recordings provided to CTV News show.

It was all part of a bizarre plan by the man who attacked Parliament Hill to get to jail to atone for his sins and get clean from a crack addiction, the audio recordings show.

“Perfect, perfect,” a Zehaf-Bibeau says with a French accent on the tapes, when he is finally allowed to be incarcerated. “The RCMP are investigating.”

Zehaf-Bibeau visited the Burnaby detachment of the RCMP to claim he had committed an armed robbery in Quebec 10 years ago, but an officer could find no evidence of the crime. Instead, the RCMP arrested Zehaf Bibeau under the B.C.’s Mental Health Act, and released him the next day.

Zehaf-Bibeau then attempted to rob a Vancouver McDonald’s with a pointed stick, the recording reveals.

His grin unnerved the McDonald’s clerk, who asked if the man was serious. Zehaf-Bibeau said, “Yes, hand over the money, homeboy.”

The McDonald’s clerk refused, telling Zihaf-Bibeau that he had already phoned the police.

“Beat it,” the clerk said.

Zehaf-Bibeau walked out of the McDonald’s, and dropped his stick on the pavement to wait for police to arrive.

At a Dec. 19, 2011 bail hearing, Zehaf-Bibeau told the court that he didn’t want to be on the outside.

“I wanted to come to jail,” he said. “The RCMP couldn’t do the work fast enough.”

“I warned them that if you can’t keep me in I will do something right now to put me in.”

And the guy who ran down the soldiers in St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, near Montreal the day before? 

Just as nuts:


The tragic death on Monday of Canadian Forces Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, run over by a recently “radicalized” 25-year-old from St-Jean-sur-Richelieu, was not an act of terror as much as it was an indictment of our ineffectiveness in dealing with mental illness.

Martin Couture-Rouleau, who up until two years ago was a normal pseudo-Catholic Québécois kid, a recent father struggling to keep his new pressure-washing business afloat, changed seemingly overnight into someone obsessed with the illuminati and conspiracy theories, one friend told La Presse.

It was in that period he converted to Islam and underwent such a significant personality change that it was his own father who reported him to the RCMP as a possible threat. Put on a federal watch list, he was prevented from carrying out his plan to travel to Turkey when he was arrested last summer and had his passport taken away.

His alienation from family and friends became even more pronounced in the past year. “People turned away from him, thinking he was crazy,” a friend told La Presse. His wife had also recently taken steps to gain sole custody of their child because of the changes in Couture-Rouleau’s behaviour.

Sûreté du Québec officers had even met with Couture-Rouleau and his imam just two weeks ago to try to turn him away from the radical thoughts he had been muttering about to friends and on his social networks. Although that’s the kind of talk that can get you put on watch lists, rambling about God and punishment and hell and paradise isn’t a crime, or else our jails would be full of preachers and pundits of every stripe.

No terrorism.  No ties to anyone outside of Canada.

The real concern is not terrorism.  It is how Canada’s mental health system failed, and how it can be fixed.

Not this Sh%$ Again!

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The so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels are complaining that actions against ISIS are aiding the Assad regime:

But the Syrian president’s ability to continue to attack his enemies without interference is fuelling anger amongst mainstream opposition supporters. “Syrian warplanes used to shell us two or three times a week but now they target us every day thanks to the coalition forces,” Faris Samir, from Harm in the northern Idlib region, complained on Thursday.

 “We are losing martyrs and many get injured but no one pays any attention. Now the Syrian army is taking areas bombed by the coalition forces after the Islamic factions withdraw. I have to say that the coalition military campaign is in the interest of the Syrian regime and against the Syrian people.”

I offer the “mainstream opposition”* a hearty f%$# you.

Get your war on if you want, but the actions against ISIS have nothing to do with your goal of overthrowing Assad.

I would argue that the gross incompetence of the “mainstream opposition”, which created an opening for sectarian governments to ship foreign Jihadis to Syria aid was a major contributing factor in the creation of ISIS.

Seriously.  Go f%$# yourself.

While we are at it, let us remember the advice of Machiavelli:

A prince should therefore be slow in undertaking any enterprise upon the representations of exiles, for he will generally gain nothing by it but shame and serious injury.

The Free Syrian Army should be viewed through this lens.

*Not sure how moderate these folks are. That whole martyr quote sounds like a dog whistle to religious extremists.

The New York Times Calls Out Erdogan on ISIS

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Not only do they criticize his inaction, the editorial board specifically calls out Turkey’s actions to support Jihadists and Islamic extremists which eventually led to the formation of ISIS:

This is an indictment of Mr. Erdogan and his cynical political calculations. By keeping his forces on the sidelines and refusing to help in other ways — like allowing Kurdish fighters to pass through Turkey — he seeks not only to weaken the Kurds, but also, in a test of will with President Obama, to force the United States to help him oust President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whom he detests.

 ………

 But all sides — the Americans, Mr. Erdogan and the Kurds — agree that ground forces are necessary to capitalize on the air power. No dice, says Mr. Erdogan, unless the United States provides more support to rebels trying to overthrow Mr. Assad and creates a no-fly zone to deter the Syrian Air Force as well as a buffer zone along the Turkish border to shelter thousands of Syrian refugees who have fled the fighting.

 ………

 Mr. Erdogan’s behavior is hardly worthy of a NATO ally. He was so eager to oust Mr. Assad that he enabled ISIS and other militants by allowing fighters, weapons and revenues to flow through Turkey. If Mr. Erdogan refuses to defend Kobani and seriously join the fight against the Islamic State, he will further enable a savage terrorist group and ensure a poisonous long-term instability on his border.

(emphasis mine)

This is not the sort of truth telling that I expect from the “Paper of Record,” and I hope that they extend it to the House of Saud (specifically Prince Bandar, who was aggressively supporting ISIS until they were well into invading Iraq).

That won’t happen though.

As an aside, Erdogan actions in the matter have set back Turkey’s bid to join the EU by many years, because the Europeans already looked at intervening in Syria, and wanted no part of the Erdogan and the Gulf princes’ efforts to replace yet another secular Arab regime with a Sunni government.

Not not even the French, who still think of Syria as a colony in some ways, were unwilling to go on that adventure.

Given that there is no meaningful opposition to Erdogan and his AKP party for the foreseeable future, I’m pretty sure that any number of EU functionaries, as well as many governments, are now feeling a sense of relief that they have been slow walking Turkey’s application.

I Guess that the word “Khorasan” is Arabic for “Gulf of Tonkin”

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Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain make a rather compelling case for The Khorasan Group being a construct of the Obama Administration to provide a legal fig leaf for dropping bombs on Syria:

As the Obama administration prepared to bomb Syria without Congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the “homeland.” A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.

 The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded “The Khorasan Group.” After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat – too radical even for Al Qaeda! – administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.

 ………

 AP warned Americans that “the fear is that the Khorasan militants will provide these sophisticated explosives to their Western recruits who could sneak them onto U.S.-bound flights.” It explained that although ISIS has received most of the attention, the Khorasan Group “is considered the more immediate threat.”
………

 The genesis of the name was itself scary: “Khorasan refers to a province under the Islamic caliphate, or religious empire, of old that included parts of Afghanistan.” AP depicted the U.S. officials who were feeding them the narrative as engaging in some sort of act of brave, unauthorized truth-telling: “many U.S. officials interviewed for this story would not be quoted by name talking about what they said was highly classified intelligence.”

 ………

 Orr then announced that while ISIS is “dominating headlines and terrorist propaganda,” Orr’s “sources” warn of “a more immediate threat to the U.S. Homeland.” As Orr spoke, CBS flashed alternating video showing scary Muslims in Syria and innocent westerners waiting in line at airports, as he intoned that U.S. officials have ordered “enhanced screening” for “hidden explosives.” This is all coming, Orr explained, from ”an emerging threat in Syria” where “hardened terrorists” are building “hard to detect bombs.”
………

 On September 25, the New York Times – just days after hyping the Khorasan threat to the homeland – wrote that “the group’s evolution from obscurity to infamy has been sudden.” And the Paper of Record began, for the first time, to note how little evidence actually existed for all those claims about the imminent threats posed to the homeland:

American officials have given differing accounts about just how close the group was to mounting an attack, and about what chance any plot had of success. One senior American official on Wednesday described the Khorasan plotting as “aspirational” and said that there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works.

Literally within a matter of days, we went from “perhaps in its final stages of planning its attack” (CNN) to “plotting as ‘aspirational’” and “there did not yet seem to be a concrete plan in the works” (NYT).

(emphasis mine)

What’s more, the folks at The Intercept also noted that no one ever heard of the group before it was a justification for the airstrikes:

Even more remarkable, it turns out the very existence of an actual “Khorasan Group” was to some degree an invention of the American government. NBC’s Engel, the day after he reported on the U.S. Government’s claims about the group for Nightly News, seemed to have serious second thoughts about the group’s existence, tweeting:


Syrian activists telling us theyve never heard of Khorasan or its leader
— Richard Engel (@RichardEngel) September 24, 2014

Indeed, a NEXIS search for the group found almost no mentions of its name prior to the September 13 AP article based on anonymous officials. There was one oblique reference to it in a July 31 CNN op-ed by Peter Bergen. The other mention was an article in the LA Times from two weeks earlier about Pakistan which mentioned the group’s name as something quite different than how it’s being used now: as “the intelligence wing of the powerful Pakistani Taliban faction led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur.” Tim Shorrock noted that the name appears in a 2011 hacked Stratfor email published by WikiLeaks, referencing a Dawn article that depicts them as a Pakistan-based group which was fighting against and “expelled by” (not “led by”) Bahadur.

There are serious questions about whether the Khorasan Group even exists in any meaningful or identifiable manner. Aki Peritz, a CIA counterterrorism official until 2009, told Time: “I’d certainly never heard of this group while working at the agency,” while Obama’s former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said: ”We used the term [Khorasan] inside the government, we don’t know where it came from….All I know is that they don’t call themselves that.” As the Intercept was finalizing this article, former terrorism federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review that the group was a scam: “You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan … had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.”

What happened here is all-too-familiar. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.

So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda™, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS™. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of “hardened terrorists,” posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the “final stages” of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could “launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.””

As usual, anonymity was granted to U.S. officials to make these claims. As usual, there was almost no evidence for any of this. Nonetheless, American media outlets – eager, as always, to justify American wars – spewed all of this with very little skepticism. Worse, they did it by pretending that the U.S. Government was trying not to talk about all of this – too secret! – but they, as intrepid, digging journalists, managed to unearth it from their courageous “sources.” Once the damage was done, the evidence quickly emerged about what a sham this all was. But, as always with these government/media propaganda campaigns, the truth emerged only when it’s impotent.

This sounds an awful lot like George W. Bush saying, “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

This is the product of the imperial consensus that emerged following the fall of the USSR, with a dash of venality and mendacity from the House of Saud.

I cannot help but think that we are close to seeing the end of the American imperium, and that it’s fall will be not be pretty.

This is Unbelievably F%$#ed Up

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Two nights ago, we bombed ISIS.

We didn’t just bomb ISIS though, we also bombed a separate group, the Khorasan Group, which might, or not be affiliated with abhat al-Nusra.

The kicker is that Khorasan Group and ISIS are enemies, which means that we are bombing two opposing sides of the Syrian civil war:

On Monday night, the United States struck targets in Syria for the first time as part of its expanded air campaign against ISIS—a campaign that had previously been limited to the Iraqi side of the terrorist group’s border-spanning domain. But the anti-ISIS mission Barack Obama outlined in an address on September 10—”We will degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL”—had expanded in another way, too, as the U.S. launched strikes on a separate group in Syria that many Americans hadn’t heard of until recently. The Khorasan Group, which the president introduced briefly on Tuesday morning as “seasoned al-Qaeda operatives in Syria,” appears to be part of a faction that is actively fighting ISIS, meaning America has now bombed two opposing sides of Syria’s many-sided civil war. Has the military operation announced by the president only weeks ago already outgrown its original mission?

The Khorasan Group made no appearance in Obama’s speech warning Americans that U.S. airstrikes in Syria were likely. And it’s unclear what the group’s exact relationship is to al-Qaeda’s better-known affiliate in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, or even whether it’s a distinct entity. Regardless, al-Qaeda’s international leadership has disowned ISIS, and at the local level, forces associated with al-Qaeda have fought the group for territory. ISIS, for its part, has been blamed for assassinating senior al-Qaeda figures in Syria.

On the night that “kinetic action” began, we bombed two sides in a conflict.  (To be fair, there are 3¼ sides in the Syrian civil war, ISIS on one side, Sunni Jihadis on the other side, the Damascus regime on yet another side, and then the “Free Syrian Army”, whom I count as ¼ of a side)

And need I mention, the Sunni Jihadis, one of the sides that we just bombed, will be trained by the American military in Saudi Arabia, but we’re going to be really careful not to train the really bad ones.

This is so transparently a complete cluster f%$# that it positively buggers the mind, and we are not even a week into this.

Nope. Not at All Like a Brush War in Indochina.

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The inimitable Charlie Pierce pulls some quotes from the early 1960s:

My Esky colleague John H. Richardson whiles away the slow days by immersing himself in recently declassified CIA documents. (Buy his book to find out why, dammit.) This is a very valuable habit he has, at least to those of John’s friends who write political blogs for a living. So, the other day, he hipped me to some recently declassified CIA material, specifically National Intelligence Estimates dated April 17, 1963 and titled “Prospects In South Vietnam.” These concerned, among other things, the CIA’s assessment of the relative strength of the Viet Cong in our adopted Indochinese client state. There’s some material that seems almost unbearably sad in retrospect:

We believe that Communist progress has been blunted and that the situation is improving. Strengthened South Vietnamese capabilities and effectiveness, and particularly US involvement, are causing the Viet Cong great difficulty, although there are as yet no persuasive indications that the Communists have been grievously hurt.

………

For weapons, ammunition, and related supplies, the Viet Cong rely primarily upon capture from government forces.

………

Nevertheless, the heavy US involvement and close working relationships between US and Vietnamese personnel have fundamentally altered the outlook…Developments in the past year or two have gone some distance in establishing a basis for winning over the peasantry and in improving the efficiency and the civilian bureaucracy…

………

Developments during the last year or two also show some promise of resolving the political weaknesses, particularly that of insecurity in the countryside, upon which the insurgency has fed. However, the government’s capacity to embark on the broader measures required to translate military success into lasting political stability is questionable.

History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

We are so f%$#ed.

Oh Crap, the Balloon has Gone Up

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We are now bombing ISIS targets in Syria:

The United States stepped up its war against the Islamic State militant group, launching air strikes on targets in Syria for the first time.

The Pentagon press secretary, rear admiral John Kirby, confirmed that the US and allied nations sent fighter jets, bomber aircraft and Tomahawk missiles in an operation against Isis that he described as “ongoing”.

A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicated that Raqqa, a Syrian stronghold of Isis, was among the targets of the operation, which began in the early hours of Tuesday morning local time.

The first wave of strikes finished about 90 minutes later at around 10pm EDT (2am GMT), but the operation was expected to continue for several more hours,

Airstrikes against Isis targets in Iraq, which began on 7 August, now occur daily. Of Syria, the official said: “If we need to go daily, we will.”

The US was joined in the Syria operation by Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, an official said.

This will be going on for months before we see any meaningful impact in Iraq.

(Update)

It appears that F-22s were used in a combat role for the first time, which means one or two things:

  • The USAF is itching to show off their latest bling.
  • The Syrian Foreign Ministry’s claims that they were notified about the strikes (no link, I heard it on Maddow) is not true, and the F-22s were used because of their radar evading capabilities.

I’m pretty certain about the first point, and less so about the second.  Basic physics would have the F-22 more vulnerable to longer wave (VHF) radars than the B-2, which does not appear to have flown sortees, and the Syrians do have VHF radars.

Also, despite the USAF trying to kill the aircraft for the past 30+ years,  A-10s Warthog close support aircraft are being deployed to the Middle East. (So not a surprise)

Charlie Pierce Makes Chuck Norris his Bitch

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It appears that Mr. Norris, aficionado of martial arts, coarse acting, and promulgating historical myths, accuses President Jimmy Carter of appeasing the Ayatollahs in Iran.

Charlie pierce is having none of it:

You know what appeasing the ayatollahs looks like?

 Promising them if they hold the hostages, they’ll get a better deal from another president. Unfreezing the assets almost as soon as you take the oath. Secretly selling them advanced weaponry because you had use for the profits of this illegal arms sale to fund an illegal war.

 That’s what appeasement looks like.

 And that wasn’t Carter.

 That was the next guy.

That is an epic take-down.

Needless to say, I am adding Mr. Pierce to the serene order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.

Jon Stewart Owns Lindsay Graham

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This Man is the Biggest Scardy Cat in the Senate

Jon Stewart cut Lindsey Graham a new one for his constant, and constantly hysterical, fear mongering over, basically everything.

He describes Graham’s, “Panic for 13 years,” and said that, “The poor man lives his entire life trapped in ‘The Blair Witch Project,” and that he’s, “Seen chihuahuas in handbags who are less fretful and shaking.”

Of course, craven abject fear has been a dominant theme of movement conservatism for decades, as I observed when involuntarily forced to watch Fox News.

Republican politics thrive on fear and panic, so it’s not surprising that they advocate for it, but I also think that they are really that scared of well, everything.

Tepid

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What a shocker.

Obama wants the folks who have supported Jihadis in Syria to take a lead roll in fighting the Jihadi group that has gotten out of hand, ISIS/ISIL/IS, and rather unsurprisingly, their response is f%$3 you white man:

Many Arab governments grumbled quietly in 2011 as the United States left Iraq, fearful it might fall deeper into chaos or Iranian influence. Now, the United States is back and getting a less than enthusiastic welcome, with leading allies like Egypt, Jordan and Turkey all finding ways on Thursday to avoid specific commitments to President Obama’s expanded military campaign against Sunni extremists.

As the prospect of the first American strikes inside Syria crackled through the region, the mixed reactions underscored the challenges of a new military intervention in the Middle East, where 13 years of chaos, from Sept. 11 through the Arab Spring revolts, have deepened political and sectarian divisions and increased mistrust of the United States on all sides.

“As a student of terrorism for the last 30 years, I am afraid of that formula of ‘supporting the American effort,’ ” said Diaa Rashwan, a scholar at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a government-funded policy organization in Cairo. “It is very dangerous.”

The tepid support could further complicate the already complex task Mr. Obama has laid out for himself in fighting the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: He must try to confront the group without aiding Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, or appearing to side with Mr. Assad’s Shiite allies, Iran and the militant group Hezbollah, against discontented Sunnis across the Arab world.

While Arab nations allied with the United States vowed on Thursday to “do their share” to fight ISIS and issued a joint communiqué supporting a broad strategy, the underlying tone was one of reluctance. The government perhaps most eager to join a coalition against ISIS was that of Syria, which Mr. Obama had already ruled out as a partner for what he described as terrorizing its citizens.

You can have a successful war, or you can continue to overthrow the Assad regime.

I don’t think that you can have both.

Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran, are about the only participants in this little adventure who are truly enthusiastic about helping to put ISIS down.

You fight the war with the allies you have, not the allies you want.

So, 4 More Wars

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My son turned 15, and we took him out to dinner last night, so I did not watch Obama’s speech last night.

Reading the transcript has lead me to agree with Dan Froomkin, who described his stated strategy as a, “Hot Mess.”

The New York Times rather pithily observes, “American intelligence agencies have concluded that it poses no immediate threat to the United States. Some officials and terrorism experts believe that the actual danger posed by ISIS has been distorted in hours of television punditry and alarmist statements by politicians.”

That’s my analysis in a nutshell:  Obama is a prisoner of “inside the Beltway” conventional wisdom, which is, “Something is wrong with the world, we must bomb it.”

I would note that, rather unsurprisingly, the Saudi offer of “support” is to set up training camps for “moderate” rebels, where the US military will train them to “fight ISIS”.

Considering the fact that it was Gulf state support for the rebels in the first place that turned a brutal crackdown on protests into a civil war, and Saudi Prince Bandar bin al Sultan was ISIS’s primary patron, and we’re going to help them to continue the Sunni-Shia “great game” there.

I also think that the course of action proposed by Obama is far more optimistic about the facts on the ground than is justified, and as blogger Pat Lang observes, the strategy that Obama is promulgating has, “Too many moving parts.”

He notes that Obama is assuming that the Gulf states and Turkey will blithely work with the Shia government in Iraq, that the new government in Baghdad will be inclusive enough to bring Iraq’s Sunnis back into government, that we can fight ISIS in Iraq while supporting the “right” rebels in Syria, and rebuild the Iraqi army, and continuing to show implacable hostility to Iran, all while not putting any American “feet” on the ground.

Also remember that we are not targeting isolated cells of insurgents, ISIS is effectively a government in the areas that it controls.

It won’t be driven out by airstrikes.

We are back in Iraq, and we will have troops in combat situations on the ground before Obama leaves office.

So much for Obama’s opposition to “Stupid Wars.”

Talibaptists Do Not Get Irony

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On Hannity (of course) J. Crewe clothes horse turned Duck Dynasty ZZ Top impersonator Phil Robertson declared that we must convert ISIS to Christianity or murder them:

Then, Robertson arrived at the most controversial part of the interview, saying of the Islamic State: “You either have to convert them, which I think will be next to impossible. I’m not giving up on them but I’m just saying, either convert them or kill them.”

As near as I can figure out, the only difference between Mr. Robertson and ISIS is that the ISIS militants are better dressed.