RE: Look in the Mirror
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4DtOhe2LfQ[/youtube]
RE: Look in the Mirror
Yes. Capitalism at its best.
Humans as diseased slaves beholden to their “benefactors” for the many “cures” to what ails them.
Capitalism has eviscerated the soul, carved it up and chucked the pulp into the waste basket. A few of us remain, surviving off the sustenance of the past. But the shoe has already dropped.
Now we see if the inherent force of the past is strong enough to produce counter-alternative pressure sufficient to move the system into a more circuitous position, into an orbit around the black hole. Such an orbit may, just may be capable of sustaining something profound, beautiful, and living. But that remains to be seen.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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05-27-2013, 07:34 AM (This post was last modified: 05-27-2013 07:35 AM by JSS.) Post: #3
JSS Offline
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RE: Look in the Mirror
Don’t confuse Capitalism with Industrialism.
Capitalism is the right to pursue gains, but never presumed to be without governing limits placed on it.
There hasn’t been any actual, real capitalism on any large scale since WW1. What you see today is governing bodies using capitalism as a mask and scape goat for their God wannabe manipulations and profiteering.
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05-27-2013, 07:43 AM Post: #4
pezer Offline
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RE: Look in the Mirror
No man. Capitalism is the process described in Das Kapital.
Namely: the production of shit through the process of the accumulation of the means of production in the hands of a few people.
Science is found in the question “how do you know?”
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05-30-2013, 10:45 AM (This post was last modified: 05-30-2013 10:46 AM by ChainOfBeing.) Post: #5
ChainOfBeing Offline
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RE: Look in the Mirror
Yes. This mindset that wants to see capitalism without its natural detrimental effects, that wants to blame these consequences on a “corruption” of “real capitalism” by forces not fundamentally tied into capitalism itself, is a very dangerous ignorance.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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05-31-2013, 08:50 AM (This post was last modified: 05-31-2013 08:50 AM by Fixed Cross.) Post: #6
Fixed Cross Offline
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RE: Look in the Mirror
It is all too easy to hang it all up on that one name, capitalism, which only indicates the frame work of the timetable.
What of the people, the actual minds, who come up with the specific strategies which are now being employed?
Capitalism is a question of securing resources. Government might be a question of allocating resources.
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05-31-2013, 08:52 AM (This post was last modified: 05-31-2013 08:53 AM by Fixed Cross.) Post: #7
Fixed Cross Offline
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RE: Look in the Mirror
‘supply and demand’ is the causal context. ‘profiteering and plundering’ is not exclusive to capitalism. What, more difficult, questions can we ask?
Have we exhaustively defined the nature of ‘value’ within capitalism?
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05-31-2013, 09:52 AM (This post was last modified: 05-31-2013 09:52 AM by pezer.) Post: #8
pezer Offline
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RE: Look in the Mirror
Capitalism is a framework. Supply and demand are two things, and they can both exist without capitalism. Capital. Capital city. Capital importance. I lack the capital for that project. Where can we get capital? We need more capital. If we have enough capital, we won’t have enough for tomorrow. Enough capital is not enough capital. There is not enough capital in the world for everybody. For many bodies. Every body that has capital has my capital.
Science is found in the question “how do you know?”
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05-31-2013, 10:13 AM (This post was last modified: 05-31-2013 10:15 AM by ChainOfBeing.) Post: #9
ChainOfBeing Offline
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RE: Look in the Mirror
Capitalism is a philosophical concept that means to group a loose set of values and idea(l)s together under one flag. People define the term differently because a person’s values/etc will be different from one another, also they have been raised/conditioned to think in some ways and to not think in some other ways. This is the problem with abstract categorical terms like capitalism/socialism.
So we move to the core- yes, supply and demand, product and producer, money and exchange, profit and loss, distribution and consumption, personal and collective property. Etc. Basically what economics needs to do is create an exhaustive list of concrete specific terms referring to actual entities and relations having to do with “economics” (this will include a lot more than just rote economics, for instance it will brush heavily into politics, philosophy, psychology and technology) and then subject this plane of meaning to a broader values-interpretation, to both derive the underlying implicit spectrums of values from within the plane as well as to set a higher moral-rational standard above it.
But it’s not that easy. People would rather think within easy abstractions, simple categories and emotional responses. Even scientists, economists, politicians, industrialists, educators, they would almost always rather play on the surface than swim in the deeper waters.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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05-31-2013, 12:22 PM Post: #10
pezer Offline
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RE: Look in the Mirror
Fuck no.
Capitalism is not an abstract, un-attainable term.
Capital means something. Capital.
Capitalism means of capital.
Think about that.
RE: Look in the Mirror
(05-31-2013 12:22 PM)pezer Wrote:
Fuck no.
Capitalism is not an abstract, un-attainable term.
Capital means something. Capital.
Capitalism means of capital.
Think about that.
Know that my perspective here is highly informed by tectonics. I am not degrading or putting down anything “abstract” as un-attainable or anything like that. My point is in how people think about these things, what is going on at the psychological level and all that informs it, and all that flows directly from it.
Yes, capitalism means something, absolutely. Ideas mean something, they are very fucking real. But I want to avoid getting bogged down in categorical terms which tend to avoid any sort of realizable common ground, when it comes to different people holding their own definitions of the concepts.
Capitalism is real because it points to something real. I want to focus on this “something” toward which the term points, rather than the term itself.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
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05-31-2013, 02:11 PM Post: #12
pezer Offline
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RE: Look in the Mirror
It points to capital. Capitalism as a political tendency is like Rat Jew Fuck as a political tendency. It isn’t, it is just accepted propaganda.
Capitalism is the use of capital. Capital is historical. People can be wrong about how they use words. It matters because you can then have geniouses like Fixed Cross falling into the trap of equating supply and demand economics with capitalism.
Science is found in the question “how do you know?”
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06-05-2013, 11:04 PM (This post was last modified: 06-05-2013 11:12 PM by Fixed Cross.) Post: #13
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RE: Look in the Mirror
I do not equate Capitalism with supply and demand economy, but I choose to view it in that causal framework. I think that Capital is dependent on supply and demand, and supply and demand is not dependent on Capital.
Exploitation of (human) resources is of course historically very intimately related to supply and demand, and when the bridge is crossed from mere clever trade to forceful exploitation (and this is not a point but a bridge, a grey area) then we arrive at Capitalism as the disease that we know it to be now - where all sound powers of state (which to be would be human-individual based legislation) succumb to the ‘rights’ of corporations, which are purely the result of bribery and coercion, the antithesis of ‘lawfulness’ in the rational sense.
Since bribery and coercion far precede capitalism, so we can not blame the state of affairs in trade entirely on Capital. Disproportionate Capital is the problem, we should aim not for anarchy but for proportionalism.
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06-06-2013, 07:33 AM Post: #14
Q Offline
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RE: Look in the Mirror
“Sustenance of the past.” I like that one.
How bout getting off all these antibiotics?
How bout stopping eating when I’m full up?
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06-06-2013, 10:32 AM Post: #15
pezer Offline
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RE: Look in the Mirror
Capital could work, perhaps, if respected in the Adam Smith sense of absolute non-legislation of economy. A. Smith was an anarchist, really. Capital adventurers need to be able to run the risk of getting whacked for overstepping.
You know what I heard on my taxi ride today? My driver had been a construction overseer, whatever you call those, and had quit because the government communist shenanigans were not allowing materials to flow, and there was not enough work.
More interestingly, he told me that he no longer could boss his employees around. He had to ask them “please” before doing anything.
How can this be? How can such respect for the worker come about?
They are all strapped. All of them.
beforethelight.forumotion.com/t3 … orld-ashes
[strike][/strike]
[quote=“BigTom”
I’m going to put together a thread on some of the spy material I’ve most enjoyed in my various probings into this. In trying to spot the spooks running around today I’ve drawn on a lot of real life sources about agents throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, whenever an intelligence agent ends up in court as part of some limited hangout co-operation deal it leaves a trace, there’s always a couple of comments that hint at bigger goings-on.
One such example is Mohammed Junaid Babar, a guy who ran a training camp in Pakistan in 2003-4. He provided explosives and weapons training, helped the recruits film jihadi videos, that sort of thing. Pretty much everyone who passed through the camp later ended up in court on terrorism charges, usually with Babar as the key prosecution witness. According to the official story this is because in March 2004 he returned to the US and a month later was approached by the FBI whereupon he instantly became the world’s most co-operative terrorist. I say that ‘pretty much everyone’ he trained ended up in court with him testifying against them - there is a notable exception. Mohammed Sidique Khan, the alleged ringleader of the 7/7 bombers also attended Babar’s camp in mid-2003. Though all of the others in that group were rounded up just as Babar was being ‘turned’ by the FBI, Khan and his friends weren’t touched. A little over a year later they were dead, blamed for the worst terrorist attack in London’s history.
So the natural suspicion I’d except any rational person to have is that this guy Babar wasn’t just some international terrorist trainer who became a supergrass, but was in fact an agent provocateur/sting operator. His job was to provide the means for people to do things that could later be used to make them look like terrorists, either in court or the popular media, or both. There is some evidence for this. When a criminal is sentenced in the US the court receives a letter from the US government detailing their co-operation and recommendations for leniency where appropriate. Babar could have got between 30 and 70 years for his crimes. He actually served little over 4, then 2 more on supervised release before being set completely free. The 5K1 letter from the government requesting leniency set out Babar’s extraordinary co-operation.
[a.abcnews.go.com/images/Blotter/ … TE=ABCNEWS]
(http://a.abcnews.go.com/images/Blotter/ht_leniency_request_ll_110307.pdf?SITE=ABCNEWS)
It also notes that Babar first came to the attention of the US authorities in the year 2000, even before 9/11, when he joined Al Mujahiroun in New York. Al Muhajiroun is riddled with spies so it’s highly likely Babar was at least under some surveillance at this time. Then 9/11 happens. Babar’s mother worked as a cleaner at the WTC and was there at the time but managed to escape. Babar then almost immediately sets out for Pakistan. When he gets there he links up with Al Muhajiroun again, and works for a year for the Pakistan government’s Software Export Board. He then sets up his training camp, flies in and out of Britain liaising with various people who would later wind in court on terrorism charges (most prosecuted, some not). The Foreign Office refuse to release any records they have on Babar from this period on privacy grounds.
When Babar first got to Pakistan in late 2001 he gave interviews to international TV news saying ‘I will kill every American that I see in Afghanistan, and every American I see in Pakistan.’
guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2011 … rass-video
Even if he wasn’t already on the intelligence services radar by that point, which he almost certainly was, his rather overt statements (strange for a bona fide radical, but about right for a provocateur) should have rung some alarm bells. In short, everything about this story says that he was working with the intelligence services while he was in Pakistan, and didn’t just turn co-operator in April 2004. Even the mainstream media coverage of this story hinted at it, both the BBC and the Times drew attention to the obvious conclusion.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIC_QZJYGYw[/youtube]
This is a BBC documentary from 2007 that aired on the evening of the conviction of 5 men in Britain for the so called ‘Fertiliser Bomb Plot’. Babar was the main witness against them, and they had also been subject to months of surveillance by the British security services. This surveillance had repeatedly led MI5 onto Mohammed Sidique Khan, who would later be blamed for 7/7, yet mysteriously MI5 repeatedly failed to follow up on leads, or collate information, or liaise with the Americans properly over the product of the co-operating Babar.
I’ve been working on the Babar case for years, and both of my 7/7 films (2010 and 2011) showed that his story is that of a likely intelligence agent. When he was finally sentenced in late 2010 even the relatives of 7/7 victims spoke of how it pointed to complicity with the US security services in what was going on in Pakistan.
guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/feb/1 … -questions
Finally, in 2012 the BBC aired a documentary called ‘Modern Spies’ that for the first time featured interviews with currently serving security services officers. All part of the slow, incremental lifting of the veils of secrecy. In the documentary the BBC essentially admitted that Babar had been a spy all along, labelling him 'a human source that intelligence services dream of’, and showing an interview with a senior FBI terrorism dude calling Babar ‘an individual who had both the access and the capability to get into groups that simply would not have existed without him’.
[flash(0,0)]http://www.youtube.com/v/0zAHW1MVTP4[/flash]
There are two other significant figures with similar profiles to Babar but I’ll save that for another post. But what this shows is that is possible, through a bit of pro-active research, to spot the spooks not just in the past but in the present day, or at least in the very recent past. In my next post I’ll outline some of the more flagrant use of FBI undercover agents/informers/provocateurs within the US, that provide useful background for understanding the Babar story.
Dannerz Offline
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RE: A guide to spies
Taking out a country’s government actually increases the amount of terrorism coming out of the occupied country. The US did things in afganistan and iraq which increased terrorism moreso than fighting it.
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12-17-2012, 02:02 AM Post: #4
BigTom Offline
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RE: A guide to spies
(12-16-2012 06:09 AM)Gobbo Wrote:
That was an awesome post. This is SIATD’s new song.
Thanks, love the song and glad you enjoyed the post.
(12-16-2012 01:02 PM)Dannerz Wrote:
Taking out a country’s government actually increases the amount of terrorism coming out of the occupied country. The US did things in afganistan and iraq which increased terrorism moreso than fighting it.
Naturally. One thing that interests me is that when the Soviet Union collapsed there was an upsurge in terrorist violence in the early 1990s. Some of this is the blowback and ricochets and continuations from Operation Cyclone and the Iran-Contra affair, the two largest covert operations in recent history. But some of it also suggests that the Soviet system actually suppressed (through terrible means, but successfully) quite a lot of violence.
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12-17-2012, 02:59 AM Post: #5
BigTom Offline
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RE: A guide to spies
As I keep saying, the British are very sneaky when it comes to the spying game. Babar, an apparent US intelligence asset for years before he ‘turned’ co-operator, ended up in court, being discussed in depth by the news media, at least in the US and UK.
Babar’s story is similar to that of David Headley, the Mumbai mastermind who was most likely working for the CIA. He also ended up being a prosecution witness against his lifelong friend Tahawwur Rana. Both were due to be sentenced in December but that’s been pushed back to next month. Rana was convicted, almost entirely on Headley’s testimony and email records between the two, of providing support to Lashkar-e-Taiba and of conspiring with Headley to attack the Danish newspaper at the centre of the Mohammed cartoons controversy. The likelihood is that he’ll get a lot more years than Headley will get.
More on that when it happens, today I want to tell you about a very sneaky bit of British spying back in the late 19th century. Like today, mass immigration was a bone of serious contention in Western Europe, in particular Jews fleeing the horrors of Russia at the time. London and Paris became centres for anarchist and related working-class movements made up of immigrants, radicals and those angry at the industrial capitalist exploitation.
In Britain they still hadn’t founded MI5 so the spooks of the day were mostly to be found in the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch. They were largely run by William Melville, the man who would go on to found MI5 and the origin of the ‘M’ designation as the head of that agency. Note: ‘M’ is the head of MI5, not MI6 as portrayed in the Bond movies. The head of MI5 is codenamed ‘C’, as recorded in one of the Downing Street memos referring to Bilderberger Sir Richard Dearlove.
Melville needed a big success to consolidate political opinion against the anarchists and their brethren. What he and others within Special Branch came up with was the Walsall anarchists - a group of men accused, and mostly convicted of planning a bombing campaign. The evidence against them included bomb casings that had actually been mocked up by the police. Other evidence were letters between some of the men and another guy called Auguste Coulon. Coulon was never arrested, nor did he testify at the trial and when Melville refused to answer questions about Coulon the judge backed him up.
After the convictions in 1892 an anarchist writer and editor of the Commonweal newspaper David Nicholl wrote articles and pamphlets accusing Coulon of being a police spy, and saying that the Walsall anarchists had been set up. Also in the 1890s a sergeant under Melville named Patrick McIntyre fell out with his superiors and was forced out, so he published his memoirs in a newspaper. They were serialised over several weeks in 1895, and I have a full copy of them. They are the earliest whistleblowing book on the British security services that I know of, and are utterly fascinating.
McIntyre outlined how the anarchist movement was riddled with informers, in particular the Autonomie club in London, the hub for radicals. He explained that ‘Most prominent amongst the crowd was the mouchard or agent-provocateur. Had you been able to take away from the club those gentlemen who were thriving on the foolishness of other people, you would have reduced the number of habitués by a third.’
He explicitly accused Melville of conspiring through Coulon to provoke and set up the Walsall Anarchists. This was all but confirmed in the newspaper the following week when they published a letter from Coulon in response to McIntyre’s article about him. Coulon admitted to working for the police, but denied any wrongdoing.
Around a century later several British researchers were trying to get more information on this, and make FOIA requests for the Special Branch ledgers from the period, detailing payments made to informers. These requests were denied using every excuse in the book - they’d lost the files, they’d been destroyed in the war or in a flood or when departments moved around. This went on for some time until in 2002 a Special Ops detective at Scotland Yard named Lindsay Clutterbuck completed his PhD thesis. He studied counter-terrorism methodology from 1829 to 1901 and among the sources cited were the Special Branch ledgers that supposedly didn’t exist anymore.
ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=6…hos.247489
Clutterbuck is now working for the RAND corporation:
rand.org/about/people/c/clutt…ndsay.html
Armed with this evidence an author named Alex Butterworth appealed against the rejections of his FOIA requests and obtained copies of the ledgers, using them for his book The World that Never Was. That isn’t available online, but Clutterbuck’s thesis can be downloaded for free via the ETHOS link above. It includes a case study of Coulon that says:
Quote:
Case Study Two - Auguste Coulon aka “Pyatt”
Many of the entries concerning the payment of money to an informant use a pseudonym to identify that informant. This time honoured method of preserving their identity can be seen where the two names are given together, usually (but not exclusively) when the initial payment was recorded.
An entry on July 18th, 1890 introduces for the first time a new informant, using the words “Speciagl ratuityt o Coulon- £2”. There is no further indication of the reason for this. The next entry relating to Coulon is on September 6th of that year when he was paid £1. Evidently his services were appreciated to the extent that his position needed to be regularised and on December 27th, the entry reads “Coulon first regular payment £1”. In recognition of his new responsibilities, the entry for January 9th, 1891 reads “Pyatt(name given Coulon)- £1” and from
then on he is referred to as “Pyatt” in all subsequent entries (1).
Coulon now began to receive regular payments of £1 a week until April 10th. He was then paid the additional sum of eleven shillings and eleven pence halfpenny “for quarterly bill”. This payment of regular bills and expenses is seen in other cases but by no means all of them,
even amongst the medium and long term informants. From January 1891 to January 1892 Coulon was paid a total of £49 in regular wages, a £2 bonus and expenses of £1-3-11. However, the Special Branch investment in Coulon was now about to produce an impressive
result.
The month of January 1892 shows four entries in the ledger: -
January 15th Pyatt £1
January 16th Extra added for Pyatt in connection
with the Walsall bomb case £4
January 22nd Pyatt £1
January 29th Pyatt £1
Whilst January was a lucrative month for Coulon in the short term, the trial mentioned above gave Coulon even greater rewards in the longer term. The months of February, March and April saw his weekly payment raised to £2-10/-. This dropped back to £2 a week from May 6th, 1892 and it remained at this level until October 20th, 1893 when it was reduced to £1 a week. With the exception of two weeks in April 1894 when he was awarded 10/- a week extra, he continued to be paid £1 a week until March 30th, 1904. On that date the entry states “Gratuity to Pyatt by direction of Commissioner. Services dispensed with - £10”.
Coulon worked for MPSB for thirteen years three months. In that time he had been a directed, inside, single event informant and probably, a semi-inside continuous event informant. He received a total of £801 in “wages” and a further relatively small amount in expenses. Whilst the bones of Coulon’s activities have, until now, remained unseen, the flesh,
in the form of information already in the public domain, has been widely speculated upon.
This is typically British - even though a newspaper published a credible whistleblower account in 1895 it was over a century before this information was formally admitted. David Nicholl, the editor and writer who had accused Coulon way back in 1892, was totally vindicated in his allegations. At the time he was arrested and convicted and sentenced to 18 months hard labour. His replacement at the Commonweal was a guy called HB Samuels, who was another police informer. More on him and his brother-in-law in a later post.
What I find particularly interesting about all this is that even back then there was a degree of predictive programming about the actions of the security services. In 1892, just as the Walsall anarchists were being set up, diplomat and author William Le Queux published Strange Tales of a Nihilist, which is a rip-roaring tale of international intrigue in the Victorian anarchist movement. It is chock full of betrayal, double-crossing, second-guessing and quite a lot of shagging. Half a century before Ian Fleming and John Le Carre, this guy had it nailed. Le Queux went on to write The Great War in England and The Invasion of 1910, both German invasion fantasy stories which I admit to not having read (yet). The latter in particular was a huge success, and was part of the reason the government actually started taking the possibility of a German naval invasion seriously. Of course, that never actually happened.
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01-03-2013, 06:22 AM Post: #6
BigTom Offline
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RE: A guide to spies
Junaid Babar was a particular type of spy, a deep-cover provocateur/entrapment agent who then masqueraded as a regretful and co-operating former terrorist. The nature of his mission, the length of time it took and the need for him to be comfortable operating in Pakistan for a prolonged period, meant that he had to have certain qualities. Having looked at quite a few of these cases three recurring themes stand out:
-
Being multi-racial or a multi-national. This is crucial in the contemporary war on terror and was important with the international anarchist movement a century ago. It was less important in Gladio and the Irish thing (a sort of localised Gladio just for Britain). If you can speak more than one language, look natural in more than one context, obviously that’s very useful for a spy.
-
Having military experience or, failing that, having been educated at a military school. Ali Mohamed, David Headley and Mohammed Junaid Babar all went to military schools. Ali Mohamed served in the Egyptian army until he was thrown out, supposedly because he was an extremist but much more likely because the Egyptians found out he had been recruited by the CIA. Someone having shown they are capable of following orders is important when you’re sending them deep undercover without close monitoring.
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Consistently behaving in a manner that should attract the attention of the intelligence agencies. Real terrorists are extremely paranoid people, on the whole, and certainly don’t tend to noisily express extreme views in public and/or on camera. They generally try to avoid doing anything that is likely to arouse suspicion, because the time necessary to plan and carry out a terrorist attack in most parts of the world is quite long. Terrorist spies, on the contrary, are often rather obvious and overt in establishing their extremist credentials, and show no apparent fear of being caught.
When someone ticks all three of these boxes, they are almost always a deep cover agent. However, in the domestic war on terror within the US the use of undercovers and informers and the like is openly admitted. Indeed, the prosecution cases are largely built on the testimony of informants. I will again emphasise that it is very different here in the UK, where secrecy is paramount and so the existence of informers is almost never admitted. The Coulon case, where official confirmation was denied for over a century, is absolutely typical of how the British system operates.
In the US it is different. A large proportion (though not all) of the terrorist plots ‘broken up’ by the FBI in the last decade or so have involved the use of informants. This isn’t a complete list but:
The Virginia Jihad Network - two of the convicted men, Yong Ki Kwon and Khwaja Hasan were informants for the FBI prior to their arrests.
The Brooklyn Bridge Plot - Iyman Faris, who plead guilty to a conspiracy to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches, was an FBI double agent.
Dhiren Barot - ultimately found guilty of a range of ludicrous terrorist plots, including an idea about buying tens of thousands of smoke alarms and extracting the radioactive material for use in a crude dirty bomb. The laptop containing the plans was provided by a double agent working for both the ISI and the CIA called Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan.
The Penn Station Plot - James Elshafay and Shahawar Matin Siraj were convicted after an undercover agent infiltrated their ‘cell’.
The Pakistani Diplomat Plot - Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain were convicted after an FBI informant named Shahed Hussein entrapped him into a deal to loan money for the purpose of buying missiles supposedly for the purpose of assassinating the Pakistani ambassador to the UN. The same informant was used several years later in the New York City Synagogues/ U.S. Military Aircraft plot (James Cromitie et al), which also involved plans to purchase missiles. That was the first ‘foiled plot’ of the Obama administration.
Amine El Khalifi - the dude who tried to attack the Capitol with a suicide jacket was surrounded by informants and undercover agents.
The Maryland Army Recruitment Center plot - Antonio Martinez plead guilty after trying to detonate a fake bomb provided to him by the FBI.
The Seattle Army Recruitment Center plot - Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh both pleaded guilty after extensive interactions with an FBI informant led to their arrests.
NY Fed bomb plot - Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis has been charged after attempting to set off a fake bomb outside the NY Fed that had been provided to him by the FBI. He was accompanied by an FBI agent.
The Cleveland Bridge Plot - a bunch of unemployed, homeless dudes who were part of Occupy Cleveland plead guilty to trying to bomb a bridge in Ohio using a fake bomb provided to them by the FBI in exchange for money given to them by FBI informant Shaquille Azar.
- Separated at birth? Shaquille Azar and Forest Whitaker
There are other examples, but you get the idea. I’ll finish up this post with the words of yet another counter-terrorism FBI informant, Farouk al-Aziz a.k.a. Craig Monteilh:
[video=youtube][youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1ATQHJt84c[/youtube][/video]
In the next post I’ll outline what I think went on in the WTC93 bombing, and why in that case the FBI informant Emad Salem is a red herring.
[/quote]
Pope on a Rope
The Pope has announced he is to resign at the end of the month. Supposedly it’s because he is too old - he’s 85 - but it is the first papal resignation in centuries.
[Image: popeboxb.jpg]
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02-11-2013, 11:45 PM Post: #2
Gobbo Offline
.:
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RE: Pope on a Rope
Interesting. I have no idea why such a thing would happen.
“I said I was going to get to your calls but…look.”
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02-12-2013, 09:19 PM Post: #3
W.C. Away
Calathumpian
Posts: 152
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RE: Pope on a Rope
Well, with the Vatican being perverted and infiltrated, and with its K2 group, nothing would surprise me. The thing with the Vatican, and many such groups I suppose, is that you’ll more than likely never know.
— W.C.
‘Through the dark decades of your pain, this will seem like a memory of Heaven.’
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02-13-2013, 04:14 AM Post: #4
BigTom Offline
Anarcho-beardist
Posts: 251
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RE: Pope on a Rope
I did hear an amusing radio snippet at work today, where some religious mouthpiece was praising the previous pope for hanging on until he kicked the bucket, and praising the current one for not doing the same.
It seems this is a huge news story but no one seems to actually know what’s going on.
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02-13-2013, 10:58 AM Post: #5
JSS Offline
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RE: Pope on a Rope
Haha… I just heard that just after he announced his retirement, lightening struck his domicile… hahaha…
[flash(0,0)]http://www.youtube.com/v/hrm-k6x3_vk[/flash]
Bank of Dave
You can keep your Ron Pauls and your Austrian school economists making money by spreading fantasies about a ‘free market’, and all your other fake icons promising economic apocalypse or nirvana (or both at the same time). One man from Burnley has done more than all of them put together.
Dave Fishwick is a successful local businessman, a proper Northerner, who founded his own tiny savings and loan in Burnley, a Northern town without much money but with a ‘fuck em’ attitude towards the City, and in general a very kind and friendly nature. Dave’s bank offers savers 5% AER, which is basically unheard of for ordinary savers in this country right now, and he loans out to local businesses who he knows and trusts. The profits go to charity.
In short, he’s probably the best bank manager in the country, and he’s also a very amusing and likeable fellow, if this TV show I watched last night is anything to go by:
channel4.com/programmes/bank-of-dave
In 30 years people are going to look back and say that the revolution started in Burnley. For those of you who want to know why I’m so dogmatically pro-Northern and anti-Southern, and why I have a lot more time for people like this than for asshole politicians who’ve never created anything in their entire lives, watch this show. If you have trouble getting the Channel4 link to work let me know, I’m sure this will be up on youtube at some point today. It’s only an hour long, and you won’t regret a moment of it. A great story, of a man who is indisputably doing the right thing.
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03-01-2013, 11:48 PM Post: #2
pezer Offline
Pothead Saruman
Posts: 800
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RE: Bank of Dave
This service is not available in my area.
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03-02-2013, 05:00 AM Post: #3
BigTom Offline
Anarcho-beardist
Posts: 251
Joined: Dec 2012
RE: Bank of Dave
I can’t find last night’s broadcast anywhere else yet but you can watch the two episodes of the original show he did last year which tells the story of him setting up the bank and figuring out how to make it work here:
watchseries-online.eu/2013/01…01e01.html
Or:
watchtvseries.ch/serie/Bank_of_Dave
Argo
I watched this for the first time last night and I’ll dispense with a few basic criticisms before moving onto the more interesting material.
- It’s a very mediocre film, for an oscar-winner.
- The traditional Hollywood portrait of angry, shouty Arabs vs civilised white Westerners was not just maintained, but enhanced through the addition of several scenes (the bazaar and most of the airport stuff) that never actually happened.
- The help provided by the British and in particular the Canadians was minimised or just written out of the story in a shamefully display of pro-US revisionism.
- This film has been censured by the NZ parliament for its inaccuracy.
What I find most interesting about this film is its progeny. While we know, for example, that Zero Dark Thirty was effectively sponsored by the DOD and CIA, less is known about where Argo came from. However, its star and director Ben Affleck, who received his oscar from Mrs Obama, is a curious guy. Aside from a few Pentagon-associated Michael Bay movies his credits are rather light for the last 10 years or so.
He did star in The Sum of All Fears, an adaptation of a Tom Clancy novel that was aided by the CIA through their agent Chase Brandon. Brandon came from a covert ops background in Latin America and was appointed the Agency’s Entertainment Industry Liaison in the mid-90s. He served until 2006/7, when he was replaced by a guy called Paul Barry, who I don’t know much about.
Brandon served as a consultant on numerous TV shows and films portraying the CIA including Sum of All Fears and Alias, the immediate post-9/11 show starring Jennifer Garner. Brandon then convinced Garner to appear in a 2004 CIA recruitment ad. The following year she married Ben Affleck.
Curiously, in a recent Guardian interview he talked about how Hollywood is probably full of secret CIA agents. His reaction when the interviewer asked him if he was CIA has to be seen to be believed:
guardian.co.uk/film/video/201…-interview
So, have any of you seen Argo and if so, what did you make of it?
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03-22-2013, 12:52 PM Post: #2
Q Offline
5151
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RE: Argo
I went to watch it in a sort of 'Oh, I should check this movie out," way but then I realized that it seemed to be about some zany attempt to make a fake movie or something and I got less interested.
Is it worth watching just for the sake of it?
How bout getting off all these antibiotics?
How bout stopping eating when I’m full up?
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03-22-2013, 06:22 PM Post: #3
BigTom Offline
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RE: Argo
Probably not, unless you like two hours of arabs shouting and Ben Affleck looking slightly confused and morose. It is much easier to watch than Zero Dark Thirty, which is a horrible movie.
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03-22-2013, 09:52 PM (This post was last modified: 03-22-2013 10:01 PM by Fixed Cross.) Post: #4
Fixed Cross Offline
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RE: Argo
I thought the most unlikely thing about the whole movie was it winning the Oscar. I was disturbed by the three seconds I caught of Afflects acceptance “speech”. The film was mediocre and okay, would have been nothing at all if it wasn’t for that old producer guy and his “it means Argo fuck yourself”, which was funny to me.
I disagree with the whole it’s anti-Iranian propaganda criticism strongly actually. Given the opening of the film which made a point of showing how much the Iranians suffered at the hands of Brits and Americans and their puppet Shah. Down the line you hear a bunch of characters commenting along the lines of “these Iranians hate us and they should, for what we’ve done”.
A side note, Persians aren’t Arabs but indo-European, “Aryan”. That makes the bazaar cliche not racist but culturalist, and I don’t think it was all that damning. The only reason I identified with Affleck and his people is because he was set up as the protagonist in the narrative, not because he held superior values. He didn’t, he was an flake, and John Goodman was boring, which is the real crime.
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03-23-2013, 04:26 AM Post: #5
pezer Offline
Pothead Saruman
Posts: 800
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RE: Argo
Do you think it’s fair to say that our woes are largely an on-going war between the Aryan and Semite religious spirits?
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03-23-2013, 04:46 AM Post: #6
BigTom Offline
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RE: Argo
No one said anything about Iran, or it being anti-Iranian propaganda. As you note, the film’s portrayal of Iranians as Arabs is yet another of its inaccuracies.
The fact that the film opened with a relatively truthful summary of the coup of 53 and its impact, which then got lost amid the shouty Arab scenes and all the film company shenanigans, only makes it all the more worrying to me. Normalising the unthinkable.
The ‘Argo fuck yourself’ was apparently a real joke and is one of the reasons the pseudo-film was called Argo, according to the CIA internal history of the operation. It was the best thing about an otherwise weak movie.
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03-23-2013, 05:10 AM (This post was last modified: 03-23-2013 05:11 AM by Fixed Cross.) Post: #7
Fixed Cross Offline
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RE: Argo
Oh really? That was the best thing, funny it was real. As I said though, I don’t think the film itself was of any (negative or positive) political significance. Though I’ll readily admit that it winning the award says otherwise.
P - No , as Iranian (thus a type of Aryan) ideology is Islamic and thus Semitic. But by all means give your (contemporary) arguments for that thesis.
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03-23-2013, 07:20 AM (This post was last modified: 03-23-2013 07:24 AM by pezer.) Post: #8
pezer Offline
Pothead Saruman
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RE: Argo
It occurred to me as you pointed out the truly vast difference between Aryan and Semitic (another of those little hidden facts of modern day white man / black man / brown man paradigms) roots, and thus religious spirits. The Semitics; Akkadian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arab, etc; had that moment of religious fervor, perhaps also philosophical fervor as Contra-Nietzsche once pointed out to me with this poem. They were powerful imperial peoples. From there comes that very specific kind of patriarchal, red clay, cryptic and somewhat prostrated flavour of societal power. Their Gods like to keep things meek, unilateral, pastoralry. In short, very anti-pagan.
On the other hand, you have the Aryans, further North, in tune with changing seasons and multiplicity in life, intrinsically pagan and polytheistic. When they say “civilized,” they mean a balance of inmence forces in sophisticated webs of unities, as opposed to a single sophisticated unit that seeks to replace all other forces.
Two Great Imperial peoples, two massively shifted propulsive forces. The Semitic are obviously more warry in that genocidal sense, but the Aryans enjoy battle and are prepared for it in a different way. So both survived, both still fight.
Yet “Imperial” means “only 1,” and the battling forces have merged in political unities that have spawned their own paradigms. Despite common belief, however, those forces are way stronger than the Empires have you believe and no new imperial paradigms have been able to outcry the battle.
Most of us, I would guess, have blood-lines from both sides of that coin. Our ideologies show it.
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03-23-2013, 08:19 PM Post: #9
BigTom Offline
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RE: Argo
(03-23-2013 05:10 AM)Fixed Cross Wrote:
Oh really? That was the best thing, funny it was real. As I said though, I don’t think the film itself was of any (negative or positive) political significance. Though I’ll readily admit that it winning the award says otherwise.
spyculture.com/cia-history-argo/
Quote:
Argo
Jerome and I then set about picking a
name for our movie. We needed
something catchy from Eastern
culture or mythology. After several
tries, we hit on it! During our 10year
association, he had proven to be
a great Story and joke teller. He once
-told a group of us a profane “knockknock”
joke, with the word “Argo” in
the punch line.
This word became an in-house disguise-
team recognition signal and
battle cry. We used it to break the
tension that often built up when we
were working long hours under difficult
circumstances preparing for an
important operation. Jerome remembered
this. He also recalled that the
name stemmed from mythology. He
looked up the definition of Argo and
confirmed it as the name of the ship
on which Jason and the Argonauts
sailed to rescue the Golden Fleece
from the many-headed dragon holding
it captive in the sacred garden.
Perfect! This precisely described the
situation in Iran.
I agree that the film was not particularly political in the sense of being distinctly or overly anti-Iranian. It was shamelessly pro-US in that it left out the British and NZ roles and reduced the importance of the Canadians to about half a dozen lines of script.
All in all, I felt that the film was more a celebration of the CIA’s cushy relationship with Hollywood than anything else, particularly given that the star/director is married to someone who is in effect a CIA asset, and he himself could be considered to be the same. It is very much in keeping with spook humour, to get a modern day CIA asset in Hollywood to make a film recounting a largely untrue story about the CIA collaborating with some Hollywood dudes as part of a covert op.