Terrorism

Meet Charles Dyer. He is a former marine and a member of the Oath Keepers militia. On top of that he is a ‘hero’ to the tea party movement and was a featured speaker at the Oklahoma tea party on July 4th of last year. Here is video of his appearance:

Dyer is not in some serious legal trouble:

Police said that when they served a search warrant, they uncovered evidence that now has federal officials looking into the case.

An ex-military man has been arrested on charges of rape of a child and forcible sodomy.

Charles Alan Dyer, 29, of Marlow, was arrested Tuesday afternoon by Stephens County Sheriff’s deputies, said Sheriff Wayne McKinney. Dyer served in the United States Marines in Iraq.

McKinney said charges included first degree rape and two counts of forcible sodomy. It is expected the charges will be formally presented in Stephens County District Court today, McKinney said.

Dyer’s problems don’t stop there though. He is also facing some serious federal charges:

During the search the sheriff’s deputies noted several firearms and a device believed to be a Colt M-203, 40-millimeter grenade launcher, a complaint filed in the United States District Court of Western Oklahoma by Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco Special Agent Brett Williams said.

[SNIP]

Deputies searched the National Crime Information Center database, according to the complaint, and found that the grenade launcher was one stolen from Fort Irwin, Calif., in 2006. The NCIC also indicated that there were two other grenade launchers stolen from Fort Irwin as they were being transported to Iraq.

According to Gossip-Boy, right wing extremists have already started circling their wagons around Dyer:

Despite the paranoid belief by the Patriot Movement that Dyer has been set up by the federal government, who they claim have had a programmed child make false accusations against their movement’s hero, Gossip Boy has learned that the alleged victim is a close family member of Dyer’s. [To protect the child from retaliation by militia members, we are not going to provide specific details that will identify the little girl.]

And with all this the media is remaining silent this morning. God forbid they have to say anything negative about the tea party or one of its heroes, no matter how horrible the crimes or the danger some individuals pose against our country. Instead John Edwards baby is the most important subject of the day.

So there you have it – a veteran who has become a very dangerous right wing extremist. If only our government could have warned us about this through some kind of report or something. And if only they could put that report out and not cave to screams of right wingers, who have had their feelings hurt (including people like Joe Scarborough). Yeah – only if.

Stories like this really leave you with a warm, fuzzy feeling about the people charged with protecting our airlines from having terrorists board:

They are the first line of defense in airport security but two troubling incidents involving TSA agents at LAX are raising concerns.

A TSA agent was arrested on January 3rd in Terminal One at LAX, a source told NBCLA. He had just gotten off duty and was behaving erratically, saying, "I am god, I’m in charge."  The agent was arrested.
Meanwhile, a TSA Internal Affairs investigation turned up evidence of LAX TSA agents using drugs at an after-hours party.

TSA officials say a videotape of the party was of poor quality and the employees were not in uniform, but 4 employees were tentatively identified.

All 4 were tested for drugs. One came back positive and that employee was fired.

Two former DOJ officials under Bush have written an op-ed supporting the decision to bring Gitmo detainees to the U.S. to stand trial. The money line:

But some prominent criticisms are exaggerated, and others place undue faith in military commissions as an alternative to civilian trials.

The people exaggerating the trials are the very ones who want to put politics above national security and we can’t count on the media to set the record straight. Why should they? Fear drives ratings, so the media will continually push a meme to scare the shit out of everyone for their own personal gain.

Greg Sargent has found out something very interesting:

The House GOP leadership hopes to force Dems into an awkward vote on the plan to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York, a leadership aide tells me. The idea: If the House Dem leadership brings a big scheduled appropriations bill up for a vote this week, Republicans will likely offer a motion calling for a ban on using any Federal funds to transfer KSM and co-conspirators to New York.

“Now that the White House has announced it is ignoring the will of the American people and going ahead with this, the stakes are a lot higher,” the aide says. “Will House Democratic Leadership bring this bill up for a vote this week?”

It’s amazing how much America has changed. Just a year ago if you questioned a decision our Commander in Chief made about the “war on terror”, you got called all kinds of names like: traitor, terrorist sympathizer, America hater, or weak. Of course those were Republicans shouting those names at Democrats. Now that a Democrat is in the White House, the Republicans feel it perfectly fine to question every single decision made by the Commander in Chief.

Something else I have been thinking about with this is how other countries handle terrorists. Take the U.K., who has had their fair share of convictions of terrorists. The U.K. didn’t set up military tribunals or war courts, instead they tried them in their public courts of law and did so successfully. So why can other countries do this but America can’t? It sure seems like there is a lack of confidence in our system of law.

Then we have another question that comes up. Take someone like Rudy Giuliani, who is out blasting this decision. Funny how all of the sudden our courts can’t handle prosecuting terrorists, yet he had no problem with the first World Trade Center bombers got tried and convicted here in the United States. Does Rudy have no confidence in our legal system, a system he spent years working in? Maybe Rudy is putting politics ahead of national security now.

Finally there is a very important question that has been missing from the argument – why didn’t Bush do anything? Bush had years of making decisions, but instead of making them he decided to ignore the detainees at Gitmo. He could have tried and convicted these people by the time he had left office but didn’t. Instead Bush chose to leave the problem for the next President and the Republicans had no problem with that. Of course now that the next President is actually making the “hard” decisions, the Republicans chose to play armchair general. Again – the Republicans don’t care about national security, only playing politics.

This is one that I didn’t see coming:

Three prominent conservatives warned in a joint statement against Republican "scaremongering" on Guantanamo Bay detainees, saying the prison in Thomson, Illinois would be fine to handle them.

Former Republican Congressman and Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union and Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, have teamed up to urge the Gitmo detainees be taken to the U.S.

"The scaremongering about these issues should stop," Barr, Keene and Norquist wrote.

Wow – conservatives calling out the GOP for scaremongering. That is amazing, and probably unprecedented.

Now we must ask if people will call the media out for the same. Allow me to elaborate with a little “a picture is worth a thousand words” example, courtesy of Bob Cesca. Here we see the famous picture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, used whenever the media would talk about him at Gitmo:

Now that we are bringing people like this to the U.S., the media has decided to retire that photo and replace it with this one:

See what they did there? They are trying their own scaremongering by showing an old picture of Mohammed in full terrorist garb. In this case the media is every bit guilty of this scaremongering as the GOP, and they should be ashamed.

It turns out an Islamic extremist website was actually being hosted right here in the Untied States:

On March 25, a Taliban Web site claiming to be the voice of the "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan" boasted of a deadly new attack on coalition forces in that country. Four soldiers were killed in an ambush, the site claimed, and the "mujahideen took the weapons and ammunition as booty."

Most remarkable about the message was how it was delivered. The words were the Taliban's, but they were flashed around the globe by an American-owned firm located in a leafy corner of downtown Houston.

The Texas company, a Web-hosting outfit called ThePlanet, says it simply rented cyberspace to the group and had no clue about its Taliban connections. For more than a year, the militant group used the site to rally its followers and keep a running tally of suicide bombings, rocket attacks and raids against U.S. and allied troops. The cost of the service: roughly $70 a month, payable by credit card.

The Taliban's account was pulled last week when a blogger noticed the connection and called attention to it. But the odd pairing of violently anti-American extremists and U.S. technology companies continues elsewhere and appears to be growing. Intelligence officials and private experts cite dozens of instances in which Islamist militants sought out U.S. Internet firms -- known for their reliable service and easy terms that allow virtual anonymity -- and used them to incite attacks on Americans.

I deal with these hosting companies all the time. I have even dealt with ThePlanet before. This happening is no shock. A lot of their stuff is actually automated, and they handle hundreds, if not thousands of websites, so they really can’t keep an eye on things. I really don’t blame them either. If we are going to get on companies for enabling people to push a message, then we need to start looking at FOX news and every station that carries Limbaugh.

Of course there is something this article doesn’t mention. There’s a thing called “reseller accounts” in the hosting world. That is where someone foots the monthly bill to rent out an entire server from a company like ThePlanet. They then rent off pieces of that server to other sites a month. It’s not a bad way to make a little extra cash. So there’s a chance that ThePlanet wasn’t even directly involved, but rather these people were actually being hosted through a middle man.

For years we on the left have been saying that George W. Bush was a valuable asset to al Qaeda. His policies and tone alone provided a great tool for al Qaeda to use when it comes to recruiting. Now the terrorist group is facing a new challenge:

With Obama, al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world.

Whether the pro-Obama sentiment will last remains to be seen. On Friday, the new administration signaled that it intends to continue at least one of Bush's controversial counterterrorism policies: allowing CIA missile strikes on alleged terrorist hideouts in Pakistan's autonomous tribal region.

But for now, the change in Washington appears to have rattled al-Qaeda's leaders, some of whom are scrambling to convince the faithful that Obama and Bush are essentially the same.

Imagine if Obama had been the President on 9/11. We could be looking at a much different world today. Sure Saddam would still be in charge of Iraq, but we would have never had a “war on terror”, but rather a “war on al Qaeda”.  Our focus would have been to capture and/or kill those who actually attacked us, not going on some personal vendetta. It’s also safe to say that our economy wouldn’t be in the trouble it is today.

The talk today will be this:

The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official.

Of course buried deeper in the article is this:

In the Internet statement, Al Qaeda in Yemen identified its new deputy leader as Abu Sayyaf al-Shihri, saying he returned from Guantánamo to his native Saudi Arabia and then traveled to Yemen “more than 10 months ago.” That corresponds roughly to the return of Mr. Shihri, a Saudi who was released from Guantánamo in November 2007. Abu Sayyaf is a nom de guerre, commonly used by jihadists in place of their real name or first name.

(emphasis added)

So this guy was released while Bush was still in office, but it’s now Obama’s fault. trying to say how it proves that Obama can’t close Gitmo.

Of course Obama never said he was “closing Gitmo and releasing everyone”. The plan is to close Gitmo, a place that has become a symbol of human rights violations around the world, and move the detainees to other places to be held. Obama said they would review every single case and decide what to do with each detainee. Besides, wouldn’t it be safer to have all these people separate instead of putting all our eggs in one basket? Also – shouldn’t we ask ourselves how well this Saudi rehabilitation program is working? He was supposed to be rehabbed by Saudi standards, but goes right back to terrorism. Considering how close Bush was with the Saudi royal family, I am not surprised by this failure in rehab.

Then that image may not be around today.

Here is the irony of all ironies being reported by the London Times:

Barack Obama is warned to beware of a ‘huge threat’ from al-Qaeda

Security officials fear a ‘spectacular’ during the transition period

Now let’s rewind to the summer of 2001 when Bush was handed a daily presidential briefing with the ominous headline “bin Laden determined to attack”.  Instead of reading it, Bush went back to his game of golf, and to quote Paul Harvey, “now you know the rest of the story”.

So if President Obama does listen to the warnings and thwarts' some huge attack, will he get credit? I doubt it. I believe the right will quickly use it to raise Bush back up on his pedestal. Of course if the opposite happens, we do get attacked, well that would all be Obama’s fault. It’s the politicization of terrorism, something that is very sick indeed.

It seems like it was only two weeks ago we heard how Iraq was the "central front in the war on terrorism". Oh wait - it was! That's what John McCain and Sarah Palin told us, while trying to paint Obama as dangerous threat who didn't understand the wars we are in.

Well now we got the chief spook saying the same thing:

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday that al-Qaeda remains the single greatest threat to the United States but that Iraq is no longer the central front in the broader war on terrorism.

"Today, the flow of money, weapons and foreign fighters into Iraq is greatly diminished and al-Qaeda senior leaders no longer point to it as the central battlefield," Hayden told an audience at the Atlantic Council, a bipartisan group that deals with international affairs. But he warned that al-Qaeda remains "a determined, adaptive enemy" that is resilient and operating "from its safe haven in Pakistan's tribal areas."

"If there is a major strike on this country, it will bear the fingerprints of al-Qaeda," he said. While law enforcement and diplomacy have their place, Hayden said, "this war -- and no one should mistake it as anything else -- is far from over.

Our side has been saying this for the past few years now and we were always chastised for it. Perhaps Hayden is saying it just so he can maybe keep his job, but there's also the chance he had been lying and is now speaking the truth. That's why we need new eyes and minds in the intelligence sector.

This is a new, and very sick trend in American politics:

LOS ANGELES – Letters containing a suspicious white powder were sent Thursday to Mormon temples in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City that were the sites of protests against the church's support of California's gay marriage ban.

The temple in the Westwood area of Los Angeles was evacuated before a hazardous materials crew determined the envelope's contents were not toxic, said FBI spokesman Jason Pack.

The temple in downtown Salt Lake City, where the church is based, received a similar envelope containing a white powder that spilled onto a clerk's hand.

I, like many on the left, was very disappointed when prop 8 passed, but actions like this help no one. It is domestic terrorism and hopefully the person who sent the letter will be caught and prosecuted. We can all disagree and voice our opposition without resorting to illegal actions.

The technology behind the list that prevents so many innocent people from flying is a nightmare according to a Congressional investigation:

In a letter to the inspector general at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last week, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) complained that the National Counterterrorism Center's "Railhead" initiative, designed to upgrade the government's master database of suspected terrorists, "if actually deployed will leave our country more vulnerable than the existing yet flawed system in operation today."

Miller, who chairs the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, cited "severe technical troubles, poor contractor management, and weak government oversight," which he said had brought the Railhead program to the "verge of collapse."

This seems par for the course when you consider the other technological failings of this administration. The problem is that these flaws are affecting the lives of thousands of U.S. citizens.

One of the big problems stems from a usability stand point. There isn't a simple interface to search for people. Instead you have to basically be a programmer:

The current TIDE system has its own set of "serious, long-standing technical problems." It requires users to perform "cumbersome and complex" SQL searches rather than delivering straightforward text matches. And its data is scattered across 463 different, poorly-indexed tables.

Allow me to translate for you. Right now you can search for a post on this site by simply entering some text at the top of the page and clicking search. You get a nice structured page showing you the post.

So what if I decided to get rid of that search and go to one like the government is using? If you wanted to search for "bush" you would have to enter something like this:

select t.body,n.title from node_revisions as t left join node as n where t.body like '% bush %'

Of course I use Drupal, which is pretty advanced, so let's go with something more simple like Wordpress:

select * from wp_posts where content like '% bush %'

I have no idea how they actually laid out their database, but you get the basic idea. Usability wasn't a factor in the development of their system.

With such a cumbersome interface it's no shock that so many people end up on the no fly list. So how much money has this government wasted on something that any web app developer could build in a matter of days? I would say a lot.

Perhaps up to 1,000 laptops, of which 400 could be tied to the anti-terrorism program:

It has surfaced that the US State Department can't account for up to about 1,000 laptops, perhaps as many as 400 of which belonged to the department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program.

The State Department's Inspector General has been conducting an equipment audit for three months. Only the first stage, an inventory, has been completed.

Internal auditors found that the department lost track of US$30 million worth of computer equipment, "the vast majority of which... perhaps as much as 99 percent," were laptops, according to one official.

Another official calculated that the average State Department laptop costs US$3,000 and figured that meant as many as 1,000 laptops might be astray - not 10,000 laptops as the US$30 million figure suggests.

First - those are some fucking expensive laptops. Second - where is the accountability George Bush promised us? They had to find this out through an audit and aren't even sure exactly what is missing? Please let McCain pick Condi as her running mate. Her incompetence writes ads on it's own.

UPDATE:
An anonymous source has claimed to CQ Politics that the laptops have been found. Not sure how much I buy into that.

Here is Bushed from last night's Countdown. There is plenty of outrage to be had in this episode, but I think the most should come from the government's "no-fly list", which is supposed to be used to track potential terrorists, but it also contains the names of air marshals. You know - those people who are supposed to help protect the skies. Just another example of how government does not work under Republican leadership.

As our troops are bogged down and getting killed in Iraq. And as our administration prepares for a war with Iran. Wouldn't it be nice if we actually went after the people who caused 9/11? Instead Bush has handed them a gift for killing all those people.