Watching the Watchers

[Mark Gobell]

For anyone who may be interested in how the flames of "news" stories are spread and just who help to spread them, you may be interested in signing up to this benign Yahoo News Group.

Be warned though - you will receive lots and lots of emails.

You can enter your email either here: http://www.intellnet.org which is worth a gander in itself.

Or direct to the Yahoo Group here:

Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com
Subscribe: osint-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Unsubscribe: osint-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

Quite a few eminate from a private US company called CRA, formerly more fully known by the cute, neighbourly monicker of Community Research Associates. http://www.cra-usa.net/

Here is their front page blurb:

[Mark Gobell]

This is an example of what you are likely to get from signing up.

A snippet of an article from the US msm in this case, which quotes a Norwegian Imam "waking up" after seeing Loose Change 2 on Norwegian TV.

Check the comment at the bottom.

Who scares you more here ?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi/20060912-121220-8649r.htm

Norwegian imam: Muslims not behind 9/11

Sep. 12, 2006 at 12:21AM

The spiritual leader of Norway's Muslims told readers of Aftenposten Monday he doubts Muslims were responsible for the 2001 terror attacks on the United States.

Imam Zulqarnain Sakandar Madni answered questions from the newspaper's readers.

"There's some good evidence that (U.S. President George) Bush and company were behind this," he said. "See the film that's called 'Loose Change.' An American film!"

He also said he doubts that al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden exist.

"If everyone respected one another as people, we wouldn't have any problems," the imam said. "But it seems everyone wants to show what great power they have. We want peace for everyone. That's what Islam stands for!"

He said that with his followers he emphasizes that killing or injuring anyone is forbidden by Islam.

===============================================

The chap from the CRA outfit fowards the WP article describing this rather benign, peaceful view of a Norwegian Imam to the spookily named Yahoo OSINT News Group with the following annotation:

Muslims would be comical if they were not so murderous.

Bruce

[Mark Gobell]

And another, for which Bruce, considerately provides the correct message. In case we all missed it.

http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=world_news&m onth=september2006&file=world_news2006091242944.xml

Explosives seized in Denmark same as London bomb materials

Web posted at: 9/12/2006 4:29:44

Source ::: AFP Copenhagen .

Chemical explosives seized during a raid in Denmark last week are of the same type as those used in the July 2005 London bombings, known by the acronym TATP, tabloid B.T. reported yesterday.

A phial seized on September 5 at the home of one of the suspects held in an anti-terror swoop in Odense contains "a clear liquid consisting of a synthetic mix for the production of triacetone triperoxyde (TATP) and crystals consisting of TATP," the paper said, quoting a laboratory analysis report.

The lab report was found on Saturday in the street outside the Copenhagen laboratory by a passerby, B.T. said.

Neither the Danish intelligence service PET nor the Odense police would comment on the newspaper report.

Six Danes and a foreigner aged 18 to 33, all Muslims, were arrested in a raid on September 5 suspected of planning terrorist bombings.

In addition to the TATP, police seized chemical fertilizers, bottles of natural gas and pieces of shrapnel, B.T. said.

TATP is relatively easy to make and has surfaced in a number of recent terrorism investigations, including bombings in the Middle East and the London bombings in July 2005.

It was the same type of explosive that Al Qaeda "shoe bomber" Richard Reid tried to detonate on a Miami-bound flight in December 2001, three months after the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington that killed some 3,000.

Although the recipe for TATP is complex, its ingredients can be found in simple household goods: sulfuric acid - found in drain cleaner - hydrogen peroxide, and acetone, often a constituent of nail polish remover.

Once assembled and linked to a detonator, the mix is highly unstable and liable to blow up if exposed to heat or sudden movements.

Bomb-sniffing dogs do not always detect the substance although they can be trained to detect the residual acetone present in TATP.

Bruce responds:

Islam IS a world-wide threat.

Bruce

Script kiddy ?

Nah.

[Mark Gobell]

And another:

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2006/s1738006.htm

Al-Qaeda conflict described as World War IV

The World Today - Monday, 11 September , 2006 12:18:00

Reporter: Paolo Black

ELEANOR HALL: A former CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) director and chief adviser to New York's Terrorism Preparedness Taskforce has described the conflict against al-Qaeda as the "fourth world war", and he predicts it will go on for decades.

James Woolsey was director of the CIA under President Clinton and was an arms control negotiator under presidents Reagan and Bush Senior.

He's critical of US administrations from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton for failing to tackle Islamic terrorism more robustly.

James Woolsey has been speaking to Paolo Black.

JAMES WOOLSEY: I think that war will go on for decades, like the Cold War, hopefully just a few decades instead of many decades.

But I don't think it's just a war on terrorism, I think it's a war on Islamist fanaticism or fascism, if you prefer, and it won't really be over until the future of the Middle East is clearly tending in one direction or another, either toward chaos and dictatorship, or in the direction that we hope Afghanistan and Iraq can move, toward decent societies, the beginnings of rule of law and some degree of democracy.

PAOLO BLACK: Interviewed on Fox news this last July 17, you said "I think we ought to execute some air strikes against Syria, against the instruments of power of that state, against the airport, which is the place where weapons shuttle through from Iran to Hezbollah and Hamas. I think both Syria and Iran think we're cowards".

JAMES WOOLSEY: I think they think we're cowards because in '79 we tied yellow ribbons around the trees when they took our hostages. In '82, '83, when our embassy and marine barracks were blown up in Beirut we left. It goes on, and in the rest of the '90s we didn't respond to a number of the
al-Qaeda attacks.

It was not until after 9/11 that we did anything, and I think that they got the impression, just as bin Laden has explicitly stated, Americans won't fight, you can keep doing anything you want to them.

And I think that Syria has been a major offender in its support for Hezbollah, in its efforts to undermine decent, largely democratic government in Lebanon, and I think it would've been a good idea to have stopped the Syrians from pumping weapons through their country to Hezbollah.

PAOLO BLACK: The Path to 9/11, the ABC semi-documentary series, which began on Australian television last night, blames Clinton, the former secretary of state Madeline Albright and other senior aides for not adequately pursuing bin Laden, leaving him free to plan the attacks. What are your thoughts on that?

JAMES WOOLSEY: I think, going all the way back to the Carter era, and including during the Reagan and first Bush era, the United States altogether regarded Islamist terrorism as almost exclusively a law enforcement problem, and some of those failures to go after bin Laden in the late '90s were because the Justice Department or the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigations) would say well, we don't have enough evidence to get him extradited if we capture him and so-forth.

They looked on it as an individual-by-individual law enforcement problem and that's not really what it is or was. It's far more like a war, but an ideologically motivated one, and we have been the focus of it, at least in part, since 1979, when our hostages were seized in Tehran, our embassy personnel by Khomeini's new regime. And we had a lot of terrorist attacks in the '80s and '90s, and we continued to treat it as a law enforcement problem. But it wasn't just the Clinton administration. I think that continued from really Carter through early Bush.

PAOLO BLACK: Your perceptions five years on, are we safer or less safe?

JAMES WOOLSEY: It depends on whether you assume that by just sitting here we would have not been hit again. I think that because of the history I described we were looked at as paper tigers by the Islamists, both from the Shi'ite side, like Ahmadinejad, and from the Sunni side, like bin Laden and the Wahhabi.

And so I think there was no real option for us, except to begin this long effort to try to bring a different form of government in society to the Middle East, a huge and long-term undertaking, but I don't think we had any choice.

You can speculate that if we'd just sat here that al-Qaeda would've left us alone for a while, but I think it would've only been for a while.

ELEANOR HALL: And that's James Woolsey the director of the CIA under President Clinton. He was speaking there to NewsRadio's Paolo Black.


So what do we need to know Bruce ?


Accurate description.

Bruce

[Mark Gobell]

Ever wondered where the media "angles" are sourced from. The journo's ? Bruce has all you need to know below, hell he's even changed the original title.

The case of Muslims v sport shoes!

by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun
September 12, 2006

http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3960

[NY Sun title: "How Terrorism Has Failed The Cause of Radical Islam"]

Five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, it is clear how terrorism has set back the cause of radical Islam.

The horrors of 9/11 alarmed Americans and fouled the quiet but deadly efforts of lawful Islamists working to subvert the country from within.

They no longer can replicate their pre-9/11 successes. This fits an ironic pattern whereby terrorism usually (but not http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3914 always) obstructs the http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2888 advance of radical Islam.

For an illustration of this change, consider an example from radical Islam's halcyon days in the late 1990s - how a prominent Islamist rganization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, easily humiliated the giant manufacturer of athletic gear, Nike, Inc.

Nike had introduced its "Air" line of basketball shoes in 1996 with a stylized, flame-like logo of the word Air on the shoe's backside and sole.

When the elders at CAIR nonsensically declared that this logo could "be in-terpreted" as the Arabic-script spelling of Allah, Nike initially protested its innocence. But by June 1997, it had accepted multiple measures to ingratiate itself with the http://www.danielpipes.org/rr/2919.php council.

It:

* "apologized to the Islamic community for any unintentional offense to their sensibilities";
* "implemented a global recall" of certain samples;
* "diverted shipments of the commercial products in question from 'sensitive' markets";
* "discontinued all models with the offending logo";
* "implemented organizational changes to their design department to tighten scrutiny of logo design";
* promised to work with CAIR "to identify Muslim design resources for future reference";
* took "measures to raise their internal understanding of Islamic issues";
* donated $50,000 for a playground at an Islamic school;
* recalled about 38,000 shoes and had the offending logo sanded off.


The offending Nike shoe logo, where "Air" supposedly looks like "Allah" in
Arabic script.

The sole of a Nike "Air" shoe.

Giving up all pretense of dignity, the company reported that "CAIR is satisfied that no deliberate offense to the Islamic community was intended" by the logo.

The executive director of CAIR, Nihad Awad, arrogantly responded that, had a settlement not been reached, his organization would have called for a global boycott of Nike products. A spokesman for the group, Ibrahim Hooper, crowed about the settlement: "We see it as a victory. It shows that the Muslim community is growing and becoming stronger in the United States. It shows that our voices are being heard."

Emboldened by this success, Mr. Awad traveled to the headquarters of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a Wahhabi http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6425 organization in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, one year later to announce that Nike had not lived up to its commitment. He flayed the firm for not recalling the full run of more than 800,000 pairs of shoes and for covering the Air logo with only a thin patch and red paint, rather than removing it completely.

"The patch can easily be worn out with regular use of the shoe," he complained. Turning up the pressure, Mr. Awad proclaimed a campaign "against Nike products worldwide."

Nike again capitulated, announcing an agreement in November 1998 on "the method used to remove the design and the continued appearance of shoes in stores worldwide." It coughed up more funding for sports facilities at five Islamic schools and for sponsorship of Muslim community events, and donated Nike products to Islamic charitable groups. The trade press also suggested a financial contribution to CAIR.

Today, all this is distant history. CAIR still can bully major corporations, as it did in 2005 with the Canadian http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2919 Imperial Bank of Commerce, but it can no longer shake them down for cash, nor can it ride a bogus issue http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/513 like Air=Allah.

The public is somewhat more skeptical (though not always
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=24324 enough so).

Successes like the Nike capitulation inspired an Islamist triumphalism http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/146 pre-9/11. One apologist, Richard H.
http://www.mepc.org/forums_chcs/19.asp Curtiss, captured its flavor in September 1999, when he called a decision by Burger King to shut a franchised restaurant in a Jewish town on the West Bank, Ma'aleh Adumim, "the battle of Burger King." He hyperbolically compared it "to the battle of Badr in 624 A.D., which was the first victory of the vastly outnumbered Islamic community."

Portraying a trivial lobbying success as similar to a world-shaking http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9011713?tocId=9011713 battlefield victory provides an insight into Islamist confidence pre-9/11. No less suggestively, Mr. Curtiss wrongly predicted that American Muslims would, "within the next 5 or 10 years," go on to win more such battles. Instead, terrorists seized the initiative, relegating lawful Islamists mostly to fighting defensive http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19221 skirmishes.

Thus did mass violence, paradoxically, seriously impede the Islamist agenda in America.

Bruce says:

Fifth Column internal subversion. This is a war with Islam and not only
fought with guns and bombs.

Bruce