So, the War on Terror includes trolls, sockpuppets and lurkers on jihadi websites? And what a surprise, the jihadis are smart enough to figure this out on their own! Even if the trolls and sockpuppets don’t use BOLD fonts. It’s almost like the Freepers have been deputized by Bushco to get â€on the case†with the jihadis, like the Minutemen. It’s interesting to me that the same tactics are employed against TNH and other reliable websites that are used on Jihadis.

When I read the article it seems to me that it was leaked on purpose…seems the Big Smurf House wants to run the show and all Terroist activities and not some underling company. See they want the pieces to fall how they want the pieces to fall in order to run the chessboard all on their lonesome. What cretins!

A partial history of WH leaks can be found here: http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…..113515/917

Plame, NIE (partial), leak of Israeli infiltration of Al Qaeda, leak of Pakistani info that might have impacted the London bombing are included. The Holy City charity (money laundering for AQ) – the one the Judy Miller is accused of tipping off, is not included.

I think everyone agrees that the WH leaks when they see a political gain. When someone disagrees they say,†We’ll investigate.†, as they did with Plame (they said, but never did investigate, as TNH knows all too well), and as they are saying today. SITE has a fairly compeling trace of who had access to the video, which gives the conclusion that the WH leaked it to Fox News.

The video is suspect – not only the dyed beard, but both the audio and the visuals have doctored points.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9777136-7.html

More than one ObL tape has been suspected of being doctored, faked, spliced, whatever one wants to call it. The question then becomes; could/ would someone doctor up a tape and feed it to the SITE folks to hand to the WH to leak.

Ishmael, I agree that something does not quite seem right about the whole thing, but I do know that it points up that we should absolutely NOT trust this administration with any secrets!

It kind of makes me wonder what members of this administration might be selling on the black market for personal gain…

Sojourner – agreed on Bushco, there is no piece of information so sensitive that cannot or will not be used by them if they see political hay to be made. On the issue of the provenance of the OBL video, let’s remember that this â€leak†of the video was made just around the 9-11 anniversary, when there was no Osama video forthcoming from the usual sources at Al-Jazeera – and at a time of unrelenting bad news for Bushco, they needed the annual appearance of Osama to fly the terror flag yet again. If they will leak stovepiped intelligence to the NYT, and then have Big Time refer to the NYT article on MTP as supporting his case for war against Iraq, then it does not take a great deal of imagination to work the system in reverse, and have SITE â€find†the video and then have the video leaked under the guise that it came from a â€private company in the CT fieldâ€, which seems to be little more than a glorified terrorist clipping service. I could be wrong of course – Larry Johnson has a diary over at DK where he denounces Bushco for leaking this, but no comment on SITE’s competence, wherase Michael Scheuer, the CIA head of the OBL unit after 9-11, has stated that SITE exaggerates certain things. Hard to know whats going on here, but it smells.

SITE may have been foolish marketing its purportedly high-value data to the White House directly rather than via appropriate intel channels. But the incident exposes what a zoo the White House has become. Amibtions R US pols grab the data to profit from it without securing it or sorting out its provenance, sensitivity or value. Bunglers R US more likely.

This may, in part, be an outgrowth of end of tenure job and talent losses. More probably, however, it is a logical consequence of Dick Cheney and Fitz’ investigation of Scooter Libby. That and subsequent Congressional investigations revealed that Cheney has virtually dismantled routine security procedures in the WH. He won’t follow the rules, but not wanting to go to jail, he dismantles them and those who create and enforce them. Voila. No rules violations because none are in place.

It may keep Cheney and his cohort out of jail; it also leads to gross violations of law and practice regarding national security information, and the inevitable release of it with untold consequences. I guess the adults haven’t come back to the White House just yet because Cheney’s â€manâ€-sized safes, off the cuff security classifications and declassifications, and brutal bureaucratic fighting are just a game to him.

I’m confused about exactly what â€SITE†is? Is this another example of private contracting run amok: getting private companies to conduct foreign intelligence collection? Or was SITE â€working†for someone other than the government?

I see now that SITE is an â€intelligence monitoring service†that provides information to subscribers in both the private and public sector. But still, was this particular video found as part of a retained search on behalf of the government (do we really need to pay private contractors, rather than the CIA, to troll on crazyjihadis.com?), and if so, why did SITE give it to the White House rather than send it directly to its various DoD or CIA subscribers?

This does stink like yesterday’s diapers, folded over Dick Cheney’s butt-print.

Katz appears to be laundering the video the same way Novak laundered the outing of Valerie. She ’found’ the video just like Bobaloo ’found’ Armitage. This time, rather than outing a thorn in their side, they outed instead a useful ’Spectre of Terror’ OBL video.

So, I’m gonna take a wild-assed-guess and say that Flatbacker Katz was part of Cheney’s ’run-up’ plan for Attacking Iran – along with the Minot nukes-on-the-loose story and the Bush-Blessed Israeli bombing attack in Syria. For whatever reason, the stampede to Attack Iran seems to have fizzled internally.

I’m going to compound my WAG and throw-in that Katz could have been ’watched’ by the same people that seemed to be ’ahead of the game’ and pulled the rug out from under the Attack Iran Agenda. Whoever ’they’ might be were privy to the ’planned’ discovery and transcription by Katz, and knew the ’handoff’ to the White House was coming.

So, the ’watchers’ put out their story early to show the IC had the video and a transcription of their own. Then Katz meets with the White House and hands over her copy of the video and her transcript, which the White House then releases on its own for political purposes.

My conclusion, if the wag is true, is that the Intelligence Community had the Video early, and told Bush and Cheney about it. But, the IC said in unison, we want to ’sit’ on the Video and ’let’ AQ release it without them realizing that ’we’ are plugged into their network.

So, what did Bush and Cheney do? They said, ’Go fuck yourselves,’ and arranged to launder it through Katz – it’s got Cheney’s Leaking-M.O. fingerprints all over it.

And, just like with Valerie, Bush and Cheney may have been only too willing to compromise National Security to achieve Political ends. This time, Smirky and Shooter may have ’outed’ our entire Intelligence Community’s ability to covertly ’look’ into AQ electronically.

No matter whether the video was ’authentic’ or not, Katz may be another red-flag marking another Betrayal of Trust by BushCo.

Let’s see if the story has legs…

Radiofree, your theory seems on point to me.

It also occurs to me that if Cheney and Co. knew the video were about to be debunked, that it’s a fake, that they may want someone to blame.

In other words, if someone is going to be barking, let’s give them a wrong tree to bark up.

I dunno, wierd story indeed, could just be Katz grandstanding as well.

What ever happened to the good ol’ days of a competently corrupt govererment. Washington reminds me of the sad c-level circus that used to come to my small town as a kid. Faded tents and not even very good at being a circus.

The leak played on Fox news first. So you know WH leaked.
also note that day was Larry Craig day. The cables were playing non-stop Craig that day. Osama tape flushed that story out.

The Post story was interesting, but it also reeked of spin and reportorial credulity. It raised far more questions than it answered. The basic story, that SITE had information that it shared directly and exclusively with the White House, makes no sense at all.

Then there’s this (from the Schachtman link?): â€But another poster responded that SITE might be providing a valuable service.†It’s the shifting alliances and symbiosis among the players–amateurs and pros included–that gives me the creeps. Lives are at stake, principles are shredded, the truth becomes unrecognizable, yet everybody is making money by building an interdependent network of threats and countermeasures.

I don’t mean to give bad guys any ideas, as unlikely as that may be. Anti-terror agencies should think of everything, and they may have, but just in case I’ll say what came to mind.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are such showboats that they don’t get as crafty as some terror and criminal executives have been. Their successors, or even persuasive junior executives in their organization, might be more creative. Since video releases are such a big deal, and there’s a race to get them broadcast and spun, why not create multiple versions of a video, with carefully noted variations, and then see which version turns up where? Some intelligence about the intelligence-gatherers might be obtained by that methodology, and a storm of confusion would follow each video-release blitz. Would a leaked, scooped version be the definitive version? The methodology could also be used to announce various planned operations proximate or identical in time, some or all of which would be bogus.

Teaeopy: â€Since [bin Laden] video releases are such a big deal, and there’s a race to get them broadcast and spun, why not create multiple versions of a video, with carefully noted variations, and then see which version turns up where? Some intelligence about the intelligence-gatherers might be obtained by [Al Quaeda using] that methodology, and a storm of confusion would follow each video-release blitz.â€

Yes, I considered that too, and Al Quaeda has probably taken such actions in the past. But the fact that they took the network down so quickly suggests that it was a panicked response. In other words, if they had been looking for a leak and discovered it, one would think they’d spend more time debating whether to exploit it or how quickly they could close it without revealing the cause – that they had discovered and were aware of the surveillance.

So I think in this case, it was not an attempt at counter-intelligence by Al Quaeda. It *could* be, but the fact pattern suggests otherwise.

Not just the facts. The story itself doesn’t add.

Why would Katz complain to the Post, any more than why give video to Fielding?
And why has the Post run it for 2 days?

Does someone wish to shine a spotlight on the provenance of OBL videos?
Or, in the openfire skirmishes within the security institutions, is there an attempt to set up a faction for discrediting?
Is Katz’s real complaint about the govt supplanting the Greenquest investigations, which may have become inopportune for some within the security fold? Remembering the old press guideline that every story needs a current â€hookâ€.

A squirrely story about shadow players in a pathologically hidden government sends us sniffing for games, petty or grand. Which games this time? Who are the players? Are they signalling to us or to each other?

dalloway I agree with your statement

squirm

thanks for the cite.

In my previous comment I did not suggest that al-Qaeda manipulated the most recent video releases for counter-intelligence purposes; I don’t believe that happened. I was thinking about possibilities for the future, possibly the not very distant future. The political and media circus that the video releases attract, which includes the White House’s feeding of source material to favored media, might inspire the creative terrorist organization to look for ways to manipulate the attention. Any counter-intelligence that the organization might obtain could be useful for confounding and embarrassing terrorist-hunters and for planning future publicity or even specific threats.

I don’t hold, as some do, that an al-Qaeda video should absolutely never be aired, but government agencies, corporate press, and even bloggers who are considering airing such a video should think carefully about who’s playing whom.

Leaders-to-be of al-Qaeda and affiliated or imitative organizations are likely to be more tech-savvy and more tactics-savvy than the old guard. Should the new leaders throw off old strictures that don’t countenance lying about sacred missions and abandoning Muslim names, the possibilities to exploit a circus atmosphere will be even more abundant. A lot of terror can be created with or without committing promised violent acts. As Bruce Schneier often exhorts us, we should refuse to be terrorized. We should also expect our elected officials and their appointees to refrain from feeding terror and refrain from giving opportunities to organizations bent on terrorizing us.

This story is very confusing to me. I feel we’re missing a famous emptywheel timeline.

Still, it does appear dalloway is right, Cheney & Co appear to have killed the site to protect ObL and/or his cohorts because they are valuable as an ’evil empire’ of the moment.

This might be the doorway into the heart of the White House corruption. The Congress should immediately look into it with as much help from sympathetic bloggers as is possible.

What I find intriging about this thread is the layers of suspicion, overlaid with layers of suspicion. A lot of automatic knee jerking going on all the time. … what does it mean? really mean? who is behind it? really behind it? really way behind it?…
Posted by: Jodi | October 10, 2007 at 17:32

Such a bold assertion Shit Stain. And here I was thinking you don’t bother to read the posts or comments.