Category: Terrorism

This is Rich

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King Abdullah, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, is warning that ISIS/ISIL/IS will go after the west nest, so they should engage in aggressive military action:

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has warned that the West will be the next target of the jihadists sweeping through Syria and Iraq, unless there is “rapid” action.

“If we ignore them, I am sure they will reach Europe in a month and America in another month,” he said in remarks quoted on Saturday by Asharq al-Awsat daily and Saudi-backed Al-Arabiya television station.

“Terrorism knows no border and its danger could affect several countries outside the Middle East,” said the king who was speaking at a welcoming ceremony on Friday for new ambassadors, including a new envoy from Saudi ally the United States.

While I am sure that some of the members of ISIS might eventually turn their attentions to the west, but they will be turning their eyes to toward Mecca, Medina, and Riyadh.

They are looking at establishing a Caliphate, and driving out apostasy and corruption as their first order of business, and the House of Saud is a good place to start.

Considering the fact that, until recently, the House of Saud was ISIS’s most important patron, I’m thinking that taking the Saudi’s advice is not in our best interest.

Cease Fire in Gaza

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So Hamas picks up some more anti-Israel political cred, and Israel mows the lawn, and nothing really changes:

After 50 days of fighting that took some 2,200 lives, leveled large areas of the Gaza Strip and paralyzed Israel’s south for the summer, Israeli and Palestinian leaders reached an open-ended cease-fire agreement on Tuesday that promised only limited change to conditions in Gaza and left unresolved the broader issues underpinning the conflict.

Hamas, the militant Islamist faction that dominates Gaza, declared victory even though it had abandoned most of its demands, ultimately accepting an Egyptian-brokered deal that differs little from one proffered on the battle’s seventh day. In effect, the deal put both sides back where they were at the end of eight days of fighting in 2012, with terms that called for easing but not lifting Israeli restrictions on travel, trade and fishing in Gaza.

It’s the world’s most depressing remake of Groundhog Day.

Oh Crap

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Israel has begun ground operations against Gaza:

Israeli tanks rolled into the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday night and naval gunboats pounded targets in the south as Israel began a ground invasion after 10 days of aerial bombardment failed to stop Palestinian militants from showering Israeli cities with rockets.

Israeli leaders said the incursion was a limited one focused on tunnels into its territory like the one used for a predawn attack Thursday that was thwarted. They said it was not intended to topple Hamas, the militant Islamist movement, from its longtime rule of Gaza.

As rockets continued to rain down on Israeli cities, a military spokesman said the mission’s expansion was “not time bound” and was aimed to ensure Hamas operatives were “pursued, paralyzed and threatened” as it targeted “terrorist infrastructure” in the north, south and east of Gaza “in parallel.

The only agenda that will be served by this is Bibi Netanyahu’s electoral ambitions.

This is Going to get a Lot Worse Before it Starts Calming Down

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We have worries on both sides about more abductions of children and teens, and Hamas and the IDF exchanging love notes full of explosives:

Jewish and Muslim parents here kept their children indoors Monday, as anxious residents formed neighborhood watch groups and monitored social media, alert for revenge attacks following the recent abductions and killings of three Israelis and a Palestinian, all teenagers.

“It is the time of the ambush,” said Ahlam Kawasmi, 36, a mother of five who cares for the elderly. She was walking on the nearly deserted streets in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City.

“I tell my kids, ‘I don’t know if you leave if you will come back,’ ” she said. The family is avoiding public parks and outdoor evening celebrations during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Among Jewish residents of Jerusalem, warnings circulated on text-messaging services such as WhatsApp asking citizens to report suspicious cars, strangers and activities.

“Pay attention,” a typical message began. “We have received information from the police that there are Arabs in Jerusalem who are opening doors and pretending they are police. . . . Send this message to as many people as possible.”

The Israeli police issued a statement saying that none of the messages were official. Residents said the atmosphere in the city was beginning to remind them of the tension and distrust that marked the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which began in 2000.

In Israel’s south, meanwhile, residents were dealing not with rumors but with sirens warning them hourly to seek shelter.

Since the abduction of three Israeli students last month, mortar rounds and rocket shells have been fired at Israel almost daily from the Gaza Strip. Almost 100 were fired Monday, and sirens sounded in 10 towns, the military said, adding that Israel’s U.S.-supported Iron Dome missile-defense system shot down a dozen rockets. The security cabinet had warned earlier that Israeli forces would retaliate with a major sustained salvo in the event of such a barrage.

This is depressing.

At the end of this, nothing will have changed, and some more people will have died on both sides.

This is Going to Get Very Ugly

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The bodies of the three kidnapped teens have been found in Israel:

Israel’s intense 18-day search for three abducted teenagers ended Monday when three bodies were found buried under a pile of rocks in an open field about 15 miles from where the youths were last seen in the occupied West Bank. A nation that had been enmeshed in hopeful prayer was instantly engulfed by a mix of grief and anger and vowed retaliation against the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which Israel says was behind the kidnapping.

“They were kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by beasts,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said at the start of an emergency cabinet meeting Monday night. “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay.”

Just after midnight, witnesses in the West Bank city of Hebron said the retaliation had begun as Israeli forces used explosives to demolish the homes of Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisha, the Hamas men who have been missing as long as the teenagers and are Israel’s prime suspects.

We are going to see dozens, if not hundreds, of casualties following this, and there is a real possibility that hostilities between Hamas and Fatah resuming as well.

I do not know how many people will die because of this, but my guess is that 90% of them will be Palestinian.  (Particularly since that ratf%$# Natanyahu clearly does not view Palestinians as full human beings)

What the hell were the perps thinking?  I could (kind of) understand if they had demanded a prisoner swap, or if the targeted people were troops, but this is just destructive for its own sake.

The only think that I can figure out is that, to quote Alfred Pennyworth, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

I Disagree With the Rude One

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In response to the Supreme Court decision giving free reign for antiabortion protesters to intimidate doctors, nurses, and patients, the Rude Pundit suggests that we engage in aggressive in your face threatening protests outside the churches that winds up the anti-abortion terrorists:

Look at that church. Isn’t it a pretty little church? It’s St. Mary’s Church in Grafton, Massachusetts. It’s freakin’ idyllic, no? It’s also deeply invested in anti-abortion actions. The congregation participated in 40 Days for Life, an action during Lent that 17,000 churches around the world took part in, with another 40 Days planned for September 24 to November 2.

The St. Mary’s churchgoers headed over to Worcester to protest at a Planned Parenthood and to “sidewalk counsel” women there. “[I]s it worth it to stand out in the wind and rain and cold to pray in front of Planned Parenthood?” the church’s website asks. And, for them, it was. They convinced one woman to not get an abortion. You can see the baby. It’s like a taste of something that will keep them addicted to protesting. A crack baby, if you will. No doubt the church will be supporting the baby and the mother until the baby is an adult. No doubt.

Come September, and maybe even before, the parishioners will be harassing every woman who goes to the Planned Parenthood, even those just going for pap smears and help getting pregnant. And they will no doubt be joined by the anti-abortion radicals, the fetus picture carriers, the screamers, the hysterics who shame women.

“Is it really necessary to be out on the sidewalk instead of praying at home?” St. Mary’s wants to know. Look up at that picture again. What do you see in front of St. Mary’s? That’s a nice, wide, very public sidewalk. The parking lot is across the street, so most of the people attending church services on, say, a nice summer Sunday will have to walk that sidewalk, a sidewalk just like the one outside Planned Parenthood in Worcester. A sidewalk like the one that Eleanor McCullen “gently” counsels women from outside a Planned Parenthood in Boston.

 ………

 So let’s get out there, every goddamn Sunday, and head to the churches that send their lunatic Jesus-fellaters out to try to shut down Planned Parenthoods, and stand on their sidewalks, just like the one up there outside St. Mary’s in Grafton, and let’s make churchgoing a living f%$#in’ hell for ’em. Let’s bodily block the access to the walkways that lead to the church. Let’s bring signs that have pictures of women who were killed by illegal abortions. Let’s go up to them and try to convince them to convert or go atheist, following them until we are on church property and have to stop. Let’s block the street by walking back and forth in the crosswalk. Let’s force the churchgoers to need escorts to even get inside.

 Shit, let’s plaster the telephone poles with photos of the priests and church leaders, their addresses, their phone numbers. Let’s tell them as they pass, “We know where you live.” Let’s film everyone going into the church and post those on a website. Hey, it’s a public f%$#in’ sidewalk, man. Let’s scream at them about how they’re terrible people, how they support raping children, how they have given money to help silence victims. Can’t you hear their silent screams? Can’t you? F%$#, yeah.

 Going to church is a choice, no? Let’s make sure they regret that f%$#in’ choice, however legal it may be for them to make it. Then let’s see how quickly they’re begging for buffer zones.

(%$# mine)

First, and most important, is that this behavior is wrong.

Second, the methods that the Rude Pundit is suggesting require that its target already have a credible fear that they will be the target of violent terrorism.  The folks outside the Church will not be slashing tires, setting fire to the church, or shooting priests,* so any such demonstration will be almost completely without impact.

I would suggest, however, that people of good conscience refuse do make other common causes with people who go to places like St. Mary’s Church in Grafton, because consorting with terrorists, even at a soup kitchen, is still consorting with terrorists.

*Though some former alter boys might be considering this for a completely different reason.

Anwar al-Awlaki Assassination Memo Released in Redacted Form

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The legal justification basically comes down to the fact that the incredibly broad 911 Authorization of Use of Military Force (AUMF) would justify lethal force.

This appears to me to be good law, but remain dubious of the facts.

Basically, and this is on a quick reading of a heavily redacted memo full of legalese, there is no mention of the actual activities that al-Awalki engaged in that had him declared a combatant, just a justification for lethal actions against American citizens who have assumed a combat role against the United States.

So, we still don’t know what he did to be declared a combatant. It could be that he was involved in major military decisions, functioning as a military officer in al-Qaida, but I’ve never seen any sort of release, either officially or through leaks, claiming this.

What we do some of what he was doing.

He produced and distributed sermons supporting Jihad, and we know that he provided religious advice to people in AQAP, including the Underoos bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

If these are the facts that led the US government, and I am inclined to believe that this is the totality of the actual facts against him.  (See my no leaks comment above)

If this is the case, then the US state security apparatus specifically targeted Anwar al-Awlaki on the basis of activities which are purely clerical in nature.

This begs the obvious question, “When do we start droning the leaders of Operation Rescue?”

After all, if pastoral support of terrorism rates assassination, the ongoing terrorism against abortion providers should be at the top of the list.

Memo, such as it is, after the break.

Another Reason to Shut Down the Fusion Centers

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Because they treated a consumer boycott for “Black Friday” 2011 as a terrorist event:

The documents reveal that Fusion Centers and their personnel even conflate their anti-terrorism mission with a need for intelligence gathering on a possible consumer boycott during the holiday season. There are multiple documents from across the country referencing concerns about negative impacts on retail sales.

The Executive Director of the Intelligence Fusion Division, also the Joint Terrorism Task Force Director, for the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department circulated a 30-page report tracking the Occupy Movement in towns and cities across the country created by the trade association the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).

He directed that the recipients of the document, who included top staff at the Washington, D.C. Fusion Center, “develop a one page product that we can send to our District Commanders to make them aware of the potential threat.”

(emphasis original)

Can you say out of control totalitarian organization?

Good, I knew that you could.

Anyone Surprised that the Vegas Gunman are Tied in with Camp Bundy?

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Roll Tape!

The Secretary of the Interior has observed that alleged terrorists Jerad and Amanda Miller spent time at the Clive Bundy ranch, or as Wonkette notes, “Oh Look Some Bundy Ranchers Did A Vegas Spree Killing, For Freedom.”

The Bundies have been tryinb very hard to pretend that the Millers were never a part of the protest, but see the tape of Mr. Miller on the Bundy Ranch.

There is a point where right wing American Caucasian entitlement crosses the line to terrorism, and the Millers, and to my mind the Bundys and their fellow travelers are both over that line.

An aggressive investigation of everyone involved with threatening law enforcement and BLM personnel is necessary.

BTW, While We are on the Whole Bergdahl Thing………

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That the homecoming party for Bowe Bergdahl because of violence from the right wing knuckle draggers:

The controversy over whether the U.S. should have traded five members of the Taliban for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl reached all the way to Hailey, Idaho, on Wednesday, as the soldier’s hometown canceled its celebration of his freedom amid threats and security worries.

………

Hailey Mayor Fritz Haemmerle told the Los Angeles Times that the town had been deluged with calls and letters of complaint that it was honoring a deserter. The event had been intended as a private celebration, he said, but the organizers decided it was too provocative considering the bitter national dialogue.

“The police chief is aware of the types of people who have threatened to come up and protest this thing,” Haemmerle said. “We’re a town of 8,000 people. The last thing we want is trouble.”

So Haemmerle said he asked the chief to talk to the organizers.

“For better or worse, there are people who blame Bowe for the deaths of other soldiers who searched for him. If that’s true, it’s just tragic,” he said. “We don’t need any more people to get hurt. I don’t think Bowe’s family needs that. It’s not in anyone’s best interests.”

(emphasis mine)

So, the wingers were threatening violence over a private party for parents and relatives to celebrate their son coming home.

All because it was a black Democrat that got him home.

These folks are one open carry incident away from becoming actual terrorists.

It’s Only Metadata, Right?

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As David Cole observes, “We Kill People Based on Metadata:

Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading.

Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

It is precisely this power to collect our metadata that has prompted one of Congress’s most bipartisan initiatives in recent years. On May 7, the House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to adopt an amended form of the USA Freedom Act, a bill to rein in NSA spying on Americans, initially proposed by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy and Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner. On May 8, the House Intelligence Committee, which has until now opposed any real reform of the NSA, also unanimously approved the same bill. And the Obama administration has welcomed the development.

(Emphasis Mine)

The “signature strikes” that the CIA and Pentagon use are based entirely on metadata.

The next time that you hear of a wedding party being blown-up by a drone, realize that the same thing could happen to you on the basis of your cell phone location data.

The First Rule of Fight Club is ………

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Do not piss off Jon Stewart.

That goes for you, Rush Limbaugh:

With 200-300 school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, and Limbaugh decides to take the side of the terrorists, because Michelle Obama took up their cause.

Stewart is rahter pithy about this:

So that’s our choice: Malala [Yousafzai, who was shot in the face by the Taliban for saying that girls should go to school] or Rush, the quivering rage heap who is apparently desperately trying to extinguish any remaining molecule of humanity that might still reside in the Chernobyl-esque superfund cleanup site that was his soul.

Follow the hashtag, “#F*@KYOURUSH”.

Our Clusterf%$# in Guantánamo

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As has been obvious since their founding, the military tribunals at Guantánamo are completely dysfunctional, and the latest problem, where the FBI has been infiltrating the defense teams is getting even worse:

The major fissure concerning the controversial military commissions at Guantánamo Bay is no longer between civil liberties and national security. It’s between the commissions and the intelligence services, with the future of the 9/11 war crimes tribunal hanging in the balance.

On one side are both the commission prosecutors and defense attorneys, all of whom grapple in different ways with bringing justice to defendants who spent years in the brutal black box that was CIA custody. The prosecution in particular is laboring to send the message that, after years of stop-and-start proceedings, the commissions are now a viable, professional complement to federal courts.

On the other side are the CIA and the FBI, which have gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent information about the detainees – particularly about their torture in CIA custody – becoming public. The intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ equities at Guantánamo, at a minimum, conflict with the successful military prosecution of the detainees. At worst, they undermine the venue meant to provide a final dispensation for alleged post-9/11 war crimes.

And the agencies may now have overplayed their hand.

Last week, defense attorneys for 9/11 co-defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh revealed that the FBI surreptitiously compelled a classification specialist assigned to them to sign documents indicating he would inform on the defense teams.

They have also bugged defense conference rooms, seized control of the muting system at the trial without the knowledge of the of the judge, and they are preparing to defy that judge’s order for details on the CIA’s torture program.

If the military tribunals were anything close to a real trial, the charges would have already been dismissed because of malfeasance on the part of the government.

For f%$3’s sake, just move this to the Federal Courts, where the jurist are capable of finding their posteriors with either, or both, hands.

Yes, this is the Very Epitome of Terrorizing the Populace

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Peter Schaapveld, a forensic psychologist, has surveyed people Yemenis who live in areas target by drones, and has determined that 92% of the populace is suffering from PTSD:

The people of Yemen can hear destruction before it arrives. In cities, towns and villages across this country, which hangs off the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, the air buzzes with the sound of American drones flying overhead. The sound is a constant and terrible reminder: a robot plane, acting on secret intelligence, may calculate that the man across from you at the coffee shop, or the acquaintance with whom you’ve shared a passing word on the street, is an Al Qaeda operative. This intelligence may be accurate or it may not, but it doesn’t matter. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chaotic buzzing above sharpens into the death-herald of an incoming missile.

Such quite literal existential uncertainty is coming at a deep psychological cost for the Yemeni people. For Americans, this military campaign is an abstraction. The drone strikes don’t require U.S. troops on the ground, and thus are easy to keep out of sight and out of mind. Over half of Yemen’s 24.8 million citizens – militants and civilians alike – are impacted every day. A war is happening, and one of the unforeseen casualties is the Yemeni mind.

Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and anxiety are becoming rampant in the different corners of the country where drones are active. “Drones hover over an area for hours, sometimes days and weeks,” said Rooj Alwazir, a Yemeni-American anti-drone activist and cofounder of Support Yemen, a media collective raising awareness about issues afflicting the country. Yemenis widely describe suffering from constant sleeplessness, anxiety, short-tempers, an inability to concentrate and, unsurprisingly, paranoia.

Alwazir recalled a Yemeni villager telling her that the drones “are looking inside our homes and even at our women.'” She says that, “this feeling of infringement of privacy, combined with civilian casualties and constant fear and anxiety has a profound long time psychological effect on those living under drones.”

Last year, London-based forensic psychologist Peter Schaapveld presented research he’d conducted on the psychological impact of drone strikes in Yemen to a British parliamentary sub-committee. He reported that 92 percent of the population sample he examined was found to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – with children being the demographic most significantly affected. Women, he found, claimed to be miscarrying from their fear of drones. “This is a population that by any figure is hugely suffering,” Schaapveld said. The fear of drones, he added, “is traumatizing an entire generation.”

Throughout Yemen, it seems, the endless blue heaven above has become a bad omen.

So, do you think that these folks will learn to hate the United States, and revisit violence with violence?

We are damaging a whole generation, and these damaged people will become tomorrow’s warriors determined to get vengeance.

Not Enough Bullets………

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The hedge fund vultures have outdone themselves, the first example are the pukes who are buying shares in the in the 1983 Marine Corpse bombing in Beirut:

Iran is still a pariah in the international community, but one hedge fund thinks it will eventually pay $1.8 billion as ordered by a U.S. court.

RD Legal Capital hopes to raise up to $100 million to buy the rights to payments from families of the 241 U.S. Marines killed in a terrorist attack in Lebanon in 1983. A federal court in 2007 found Iran liable for the truck-bomb attack, which led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from war-torn Lebanon.

Iran, of course, is not on the best of terms with the U.S., and the two countries do not have diplomatic relations. Still, Iran’s central bank is appealing the $1.8 billion verdict against it.

Victims’ families agreed to allow RD to buy stakes in the judgment. The firm will not buy out any of the beneficiaries, instead investing only in pieces of each of the 151 claims. The Iran fund is RD’s first ever focused on a single case, The Wall Street Journal reports.

And then there are the vulture funds who are buying into the abject misery and death that the banksters (and the Germans) have caused in Greece and Portugal:

Yield-hungry investors are flocking back to Greek and Portuguese markets, shunned by international buyers for four years, as the outlook for the bailed-out countries improves and alternatives look more expensive or increasingly risky.

Portuguese and Greek shares and bonds have been the best performers in Europe in 2014, and funds invested in them are making a killing, Thomson Reuters data shows.

Investors say they are driven by economic improvement, which provides fresh impetus to an initial bounce triggered by the European Central Bank’s pledge in 2012 to save the euro.

Potential investment alternatives are also less tempting. Tensions between the West and Russia and global growth concerns cloud the outlook for similar-yielding emerging markets, while a 1-1/2 year rally has shrunk returns elsewhere in euro zone debt.

“It’s not so much an interest-rate-driven rally but much more a structural shift and a perception that the euro crisis is behind us,” said Franz Wenzel, chief strategist at AXA Investment Managers, which manages assets worth about 550 billion euros ($760 billion).

After nearly crashing out of the euro zone in 2012, Greece’s recession is easing, while the Portuguese economy is already rebounding. Lisbon is due to exit its international bailout in about two months.

As much as Timothy Geithner might disagree, there has to be well defined limits to what is a legal financial speculative instrument.

These people are F%$#ing ghouls.

What Do the FBI, and Joe DiMaggio Have in Common?

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An unprecedented streak.

The FBI has now found that all the shootings since 1993, all 150 151, investigated by the FBI, have found the FBI blameless.

Hoocoodanode:

Ending an interrogation in its investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing with a dead body and a host of new questions was not the sort of thing the FBI wanted.

But on May 22, an FBI agent shot Ibragim Todashev – a 27-year old former mixed-martial arts fighter and associate of one of the suspected bombers – seven times, killing him. The agent had just completed a lengthy interrogation of Todashev in his Orlando apartment, part of an inquiry into the already-dead bombing suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. One of the bullets appears to have entered through the top of Todashev’s head.

The FBI’s story, doled out through anonymous leaks, changed several times in the weeks that followed. First, Todashev, who had voluntarily endured hours of questioning, lunged at the FBI agent with a knife, or even a sword. Then it was a length of pipe. Other accounts had him knocking over a table. At least one account held that Todashev was unarmed. The version that currently stands is that Todashev wielded a metal pole – or, perhaps, a broomstick.

Little is known about that mysterious pole-slash-broomstick: its heft, its dimensions, its use. Yet it is likely to be a major difference between vindication and damnation of the FBI’s handling of the case. A Florida prosecutor examining the case is expected to publish the results of an long-awaited investigation into Todashev’s death on Tuesday morning.

Unknowns accumulate in the Todashev shooting. Two Florida detectives reportedly aided the FBI interrogation, and their role during the shooting remains unclear. Florida’s autopsy report, available since July, was barred from release by the FBI. The bureau’s months of silence over the case have compounded the questions it faces.

But the FBI has already reached its conclusion. An internal FBI inquiry vindicated the agent, whose name is not public, months ago. That’s typical for the FBI – between 1993 and 2011, its agents fatally shot 70 people and wounded another 80, and the bureau found no major improprieties in any of those cases, according to records obtained by the New York Times last year.

………

The Florida prosecutor conducting that independent investigation, Jeffrey Ashton, batted away reports on Friday that he has already exonerated the special agent who shot Todashev. He still may, and the bureau has to be hoping he will. The worst outcome for the bureau in the Todashev shooting would be for Ashton to contradict its findings and effectively indict its integrity.

So, the FBI says that everything in hunky dory, and the subtext of this article is that they are leaning on the local prosecutor who is investigating locally.

Just lovely.

Somewhere Out There, J. Edgar Hoover is Laughing

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Last night, Rachel Maddow had an update on the suspicious shooting of unarmed Ibragim Todashev in his own apartment while questioning him about his relationship with alleged Boston bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

The FBI is still sitting on their report.

They are still forbidding the coroner from releasing his report.

They have detained, deported, or otherwise excluded everyone who knew Todashev, as Maddow details below.

The FBI is clearly engaged in an aggressive coverup, and the only thing that I can think of that they would feel necessary to cover up was that the Tsarnaev brothers were a part of a botched anti-terrorism sting that went very, very bad.

I guess that I am wearing my tinfoil hat today.

The FBI’s No Longer Chases Crooks. It Spies on Us

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The FBI has officially removed law enforcement as its primary function, and replaced it with domestic national security:

The FBI’s creeping advance into the world of counterterrorism is nothing new. But quietly and without notice, the agency has finally decided to make it official in one of its organizational fact sheets. Instead of declaring “law enforcement” as its “primary function,” as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists “national security” as its chief mission. The changes largely reflect the FBI reforms put in place after September 11, 2001, which some have criticized for de-prioritizing law enforcement activities. Regardless, with the 9/11 attacks more than a decade in the past, the timing of the edits is baffling some FBI-watchers.

 “What happened in the last year that changed?” asked Kel McClanahan, a Washington-based national security lawyer.

 McClanahan noticed the change last month while reviewing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the agency. The FBI fact sheet accompanies every FOIA response and highlights a variety of facts about the agency. After noticing the change, McClanahan reviewed his records and saw that the revised fact sheets began going out this summer. “I think they’re trying to rebrand,” he said. “So many good things happen to your agency when you tie it to national security.”

………

“Violent crime, property crime and white-collar crime: All those things had reductions in the number of people available to investigate them,” former FBI agent Brad Garrett told Foreign Policy. “Are there cases they missed? Probably.”

 Last month, Robert Holley, the special agent in charge in Chicago, said the agency’s focus on terrorism and other crimes continued to affect the level of resources available to combat the violent crime plaguing the city. “If I put more resources on violent crime, I’d have to take away from other things,” he told The Chicago Tribune.

So, now the FBI is in the business of manufacturing terrorism busts by entrapping Islamic losers who could not blow up a paper bag otherwise, not prosecuting interstate criminals, pursuing gun smugglers, or the banksters.

Their job is now to manufacture crimes on people who are disfavored, and spying on the rest of us.

Much Stasi anyone?

H/T Seriously, somewhere in Hell, Crooks and Liars.

Clearly, Answer is More Money to the NSA Contractors for Cyberdefense

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Did you hear about the attack on a power plant in California?

No, it was not a cyber attack, it was guys with guns:

When U.S. officials warn about “attacks” on electric power facilities these days, the first thing that comes to mind is probably a computer hacker trying to shut the lights off in a city with malware. But a more traditional attack on a power station in California has U.S. officials puzzled and worried about the physical security of the the electrical grid–from attackers who come in with guns blazing.

Around 1:00 AM on April 16, at least one individual (possibly two) entered two different manholes at the PG&E Metcalf power substation, southeast of San Jose, and cut fiber cables in the area around the substation. That knocked out some local 911 services, landline service to the substation, and cell phone service in the area, a senior U.S. intelligence official told Foreign Policy. The intruder(s) then fired more than 100 rounds from what two officials described as a high-powered rifle at several transformers in the facility. Ten transformers were damaged in one area of the facility, and three transformer banks — or groups of transformers — were hit in another, according to a PG&E spokesman.

………

“These were not amateurs taking potshots,” Mark Johnson, a former vice president for transmission operations at PG&E, said last month at a conference on grid security held in Philadelphia. “My personal view is that this was a dress rehearsal” for future attacks.

I am inclined to agree with Mr. Johnson.

We’ve spent billions on cyber defense for an attack on the grid which has never occurred, anywhere in the world, but physical attacks on power stations by insurgents have been occurring since power plants first existed.

Of course, it’s not the current business model for the for-profit portion of out state security apparatus, so not a whole bunch of money there.