September 2014 archive

The Khorasan Group: Anatomy of a Fake Terror Threat to Justify Bombing Syria

By Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept

9/28/14

As the Obama administration prepared to bomb Syria without Congressional or U.N. authorization, it faced two problems. The first was the difficulty of sustaining public support for a new years-long war against ISIS, a group that clearly posed no imminent threat to the “homeland.” A second was the lack of legal justification for launching a new bombing campaign with no viable claim of self-defense or U.N. approval.

The solution to both problems was found in the wholesale concoction of a brand new terror threat that was branded “The Khorasan Group.” After spending weeks depicting ISIS as an unprecedented threat – too radical even for Al Qaeda! – administration officials suddenly began spoon-feeding their favorite media organizations and national security journalists tales of a secret group that was even scarier and more threatening than ISIS, one that posed a direct and immediate threat to the American Homeland. Seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore.

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The genesis of the name was itself scary: “Khorasan refers to a province under the Islamic caliphate, or religious empire, of old that included parts of Afghanistan.” AP depicted the U.S. officials who were feeding them the narrative as engaging in some sort of act of brave, unauthorized truth-telling: “many U.S. officials interviewed for this story would not be quoted by name talking about what they said was highly classified intelligence.”

On the morning of September 18, CBS News broadcast a segment that is as pure war propaganda as it gets: directly linking the soon-to-arrive U.S. bombing campaign in Syria to the need to protect Americans from being exploded in civilian jets by Khorasan.

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Orr then announced that while ISIS is “dominating headlines and terrorist propaganda,” Orr’s “sources” warn of “a more immediate threat to the U.S. Homeland.” As Orr spoke, CBS flashed alternating video showing scary Muslims in Syria and innocent westerners waiting in line at airports, as he intoned that U.S. officials have ordered “enhanced screening” for “hidden explosives.” This is all coming, Orr explained, from  “an emerging threat in Syria” where “hardened terrorists” are building “hard to detect bombs.”

The U.S. government, Orr explained, is trying to keep this all a secret; they won’t even mention the group’s name in public out of security concerns! But, Orr was there to reveal the truth, as his “sources confirm the Al Qaeda cell goes by the name Khorasan.” And they’re “developing fresh plots to attack U.S. aviation.”

Later that day, Obama administration officials began publicly touting the group, when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned starkly: “in terms of threat to the homeland, Khorasan may pose as much of a danger as the Islamic State.” Then followed an avalanche of uncritical media reports detailing this Supreme Threat, excitingly citing anonymous officials as though they had uncovered a big secret the government was trying to conceal.

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Once the bombing campaign was underway, ISIS – the original theme of the attack – largely faded into the background, as Obama officials and media allies aggressively touted attacks on Khorasan leaders and the disruption of its American-targeting plots.

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(W)hat was clear was that this group had to be bombed in Syria to save American lives, as the terrorist group even planned to conceal explosive devices in toothpaste or flammable clothing as a means to target U.S. airliners. The day following the first bombings, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed: “We hit them last night out of a concern that they were getting close to an execution date of some of the plans that we have seen.”

CNN’s supremely stenographic Pentagon reporter, Barbara Starr, went on air as videos of shiny new American fighter jets and the Syria bombing were shown and explained that this was all necessary to stop a Khorasan attack very close to being carried out against the west.

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But once it served its purpose of justifying the start of the bombing campaign in Syria, the Khorasan narrative simply evaporated as quickly as it materialized.

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On September 25, the New York Times – just days after hyping the Khorasan threat to the homeland – wrote that “the group’s evolution from obscurity to infamy has been sudden.” And the Paper of Record began, for the first time, to note how little evidence actually existed for all those claims about the imminent threats posed to the homeland.

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Late last week, Associated Press’ Ken Dilanian – the first to unveil the new Khorasan Product in mid-September – published a new story explaining that just days after bombing “Khorasan” targets in Syria, high-ranking U.S. officials seemingly backed off all their previous claims of an “imminent” threat from the group. Headlined “U.S. Officials Offer More Nuanced Take on Khorasan Threat,” it noted that “several U.S. officials told reporters this week that the group was in the final stages of planning an attack on the West, leaving the impression that such an attack was about to happen.”

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There are serious questions about whether the Khorasan Group even exists in any meaningful or identifiable manner. Aki Peritz, a CIA counterterrorism official until 2009, told Time: “I’d certainly never heard of this group while working at the agency,” while Obama’s former U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford said: “We used the term (Khorasan) inside the government, we don’t know where it came from….All I know is that they don’t call themselves that.” As the Intercept was finalizing this article, former terrorism federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review that the group was a scam: “You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan … had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.”

What happened here is all-too-familiar. The Obama administration needed propagandistic and legal rationale for bombing yet another predominantly Muslim country. While emotions over the ISIS beheading videos were high, they were not enough to sustain a lengthy new war.

So after spending weeks promoting ISIS as Worse Than Al Qaeda™, they unveiled a new, never-before-heard-of group that was Worse Than ISIS™. Overnight, as the first bombs on Syria fell, the endlessly helpful U.S. media mindlessly circulated the script they were given: this new group was composed of “hardened terrorists,” posed an “imminent” threat to the U.S. homeland, was in the “final stages” of plots to take down U.S. civilian aircraft, and could “launch more-coordinated and larger attacks on the West in the style of the 9/11 attacks from 2001.””

As usual, anonymity was granted to U.S. officials to make these claims. As usual, there was almost no evidence for any of this. Nonetheless, American media outlets – eager, as always, to justify American wars – spewed all of this with very little skepticism. Worse, they did it by pretending that the U.S. Government was trying not to talk about all of this – too secret! – but they, as intrepid, digging journalists, managed to unearth it from their courageous “sources.” Once the damage was done, the evidence quickly emerged about what a sham this all was. But, as always with these government/media propaganda campaigns, the truth emerged only when it’s impotent.

Al-Qaeda-linked group warns US-led coalition

 Nusra Front vows retaliation over military operation in Syria as air raids target ISIL fighters besieging Kurdish town.

Last updated: 28 Sep 2014 07:10

A group linked to al-Qaeda has pledged retaliation over the ongoing air strikes in Syria, as the US-led coalition widens its assault on ISIL targets in Syria and British warplanes fly their first combat missions over neighbouring Iraq.

In its first reaction to the military operation aimed at destroying ISIL, or the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant, the Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch, said the air strikes in Syria were a “war against Islam”, and threatened to attack the worldwide interests of participating Western and Arab countries.

A US attack on a Nusra base in Aleppo on the first day of the air campaign killed dozens of the group’s fighters.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover  we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Today’s word: Yellow dog Democrat

Fifteen or so years ago I used to consider myself one. As far as I knew, it meant I’d vote in every election, I’d vote for everyone on the party line- never splitting, and I’d vote for a yellow dog if there was a D next to its name. You could say I’ve evolved though I still can’t spell worth a dam.

I used the phrase recently in a conversation with a political neophyte who had never heard it before and I was asked indignantly what the hell I meant by that!  I tried to explain as best I could, when I was interrupted and asked “yes but why the term yellow dog?” as if I had just dissed every yellow labrador retriever fan on earth.  Labs are great! I really like them and they like jumping on me and licking my face! Honest!

So why the term yellow dog? I had to admit I was completely stumped. I guess I’m just not as well read and worldly as I pretend to be. Who’s the neophyte now she asks.

Following Auntie Mame’s advice, first stop, Merriam-Webster. Everyone one has had an Auntie Meme figure in their life right? To the inter tubes!

Definition of YELLOW-DOG

yel·low-dog adjective

1:  mean, contemptible

2:  of or relating to opposition to trade unionism or a labor union

First Known Use of YELLOW-DOG

1880

Browse

Next Word in the Dictionary: yellow-dog contract

Well that’s Not Cool. I’ve never considered myself anti union. Even back in 1998 when I was a self labeled YDDem. Mean & contemptible… well that depends on who you asked.

I had a vague recollection about yellow-dog contracts from a junior high history class. Better click on that to see how truly Not Cool this is.

Definition of YELLOW-DOG CONTRACT  

yellow-dog contract – noun

an employment contract in which a worker disavows membership in and agrees not to join a labor union in order to get a job

First Known Use of YELLOW-DOG CONTRACT

1920

Ugh. My 1998 self was not my best self.

So the first known use of Yellow-Dog was in 1880.

First known use of yellow dog contract was 1920.  

But wait, there’s more. Onto wikipedia.

Yellow Dog Democrats was a political term applied to voters in the Southern United States who voted solely for candidates who represented the Democratic Party. The term originated in the late 19th century. These voters would allegedly “vote for a yellow dog before they would vote for any Republican”.[1][2] The term is now more generally applied to refer to any Democrat who will vote a straight party ticket under any circumstances.

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The first known usage to date of “yaller dog” in relation to Democrats occurred in the 1900 Kentucky gubernatorial contest involving Kentucky Governor William Goebel. Theodore Hallam was criticized at a Democratic Party meeting for first supporting Goebel, then campaigning against him.

The critic pointed out that Hallam earlier had said “if the Democrats of Kentucky, in convention assembled, nominated a yaller dog for governor you would vote for him” and asked “why do you now repudiate the nominee of that convention, the Honorable William Goebel?” Hallam responded:

   “I admit,” he stated blandly, “that I said then what I now repeat, namely, that when the Democratic Party of Kentucky, in convention assembled, sees fit in its wisdom to nominate a yaller dog for the governorship of this great state, I will support him – but lower than that ye shall not drag me!“[7]

There are indications that the term was in widespread and easily understandable use by 1923. In a letter written in Huntland, Tennessee by W. L. Moore of Kansas City, Missouri on May 9, 1923, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Moore writes:[citation needed]

   “I am a Democrat from inheritance, from prejudice and principle, if the principle suits me. But I have passed the yaller dog degree.”

Emphasis mine. The only wiki link I included in that quote from the yellow dog page was the one for that Democratic Kentucky Gov William Goebel. If you click through you’ll learn that he really was a pretty unscrupulous politician even by politician standards. As you might expect he shifted loyalties and principles as needed. Though after rigging his own election for Governor, he was shot the day before he was to be sworn in. He only served for 4 days before he kicked the bucket. No one was convicted. Cough.

More from the wiki:

The phrase “yellow dog” may be a reference to a breed of dog known as the Carolina Dog indigenous to the Americas, specifically the Southern United States, and not descended from Eurasian breeds.[3]

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The Carolina Dog, or American Dingo, was originally a landrace or naturally selected type of dog which was discovered living as a wild dog or free roaming dog by Dr. I. Lehr Brisbin. Carolina Dogs are now bred and kept in captive collections or packs, and as pets. A breed standard has been developed by the United Kennel Club that now specifies the appearance of these dogs.

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Carolina Dogs were discovered during the 1970s living in isolated stretches of longleaf pines and cypress swamps in the Southeastern United States.

Clicking through to the wiki on Carolina Dogs, it seems unlikely anyhow that Abe Lincoln and the others that used the term Yellow Dogs were referring to this breed or any other yellow haired dog. You could break it down a bit more and look up all the possible meanings of the word Yellow and the word Dog. But I don’t think that answers the deeper question of how this phrase came to be used as a point of pride. That will take someone better than me.

This Day in History

News & Blogs below

Adapted from Rant of the Week at The Stars Hollow Gazette

The resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder was announced on Thursday afternoon by the White House. Mr. Holder was among Obama’s first nominees to the cabinet. The president-elect announced his selection on the same day he announced Hillary Clinton’s appointment as secretary of state, at a time when Guantanamo Bay closure, the torture of prisoners, and regulatory failure on Wall Street after the 2008 financial crisis was all looming in the air.

While his track record in the mainstream press today has been kind to him, painting him as the liberal voice in the Obama administration, his track record is less desirable. Mr. Holder signed off on the National Security Agency’s authority to sweep up the phone records of millions of Americans not charged with any crime. We remember him for the relentless pursuit of whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden and Aaron Swartz. While these whistleblowers were upholding our constitution and the people’s right to know, he was not. He authorized the subpoena directed at journalists and approved the CIA killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen working with al-Qaeda, instead of just having him arrested and giving him his day in court.

Transcript

Financial frauds had a friend in Holder

by William K. Black, Al Jazeera

September 26, 2014 6:00AM ET

Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general at a time when the world desperately needed the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to hold accountable the elite bankers who oversaw the epidemic of fraud that drove the 2008 global financial crisis and triggered the Great Recession. After nearly six years in office, Holder announced on Sept. 25 that he plans to step down, without having brought to justice even one of the executives responsible for the crisis. His tenure represents the worst strategic failure against elite white-collar crime in the history of the Department of Justice (DOJ).

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In addition to the failure to prosecute the leaders of those massive frauds, Holder’s dismal record includes 1) failing to prosecute the elite bankers who led the largest (by several orders of magnitude) price-rigging cartel in history – the LIBOR scandal, in which the world’s largest banks conspired to rig the reported interest rates at which the banks were willing to lend to one another, which affected prices on over $300 trillion in transactions; 2) failing to prosecute the massive foreclosure frauds (robo-signing), in which bank employees perjured themselves by signing more than 100,000 false affidavits in order to deceive the authorities that they had a right to foreclose on homes; 3) failing to prosecute the bid-rigging cartels of bond issuances in order to raise the costs to U.S. cities, counties and states of borrowing money in order to increase banks’ illegal profits; 4) failing to prosecute money laundering by HSBC for the murderous Sinaloa and Norte del Valle drug cartels; 5)  failing to prosecute the senior bank officers of Standard Chartered who helped fund of terrorists and nations that support terrorism; and 6) failing to prosecute the controlling officers of Credit Suisse who for decades helped wealthy Americans unlawfully evade U.S. taxes and then obstructed investigations by the DOJ and Internal Revenue Service for many years.  

Holder and his defenders will respond to such charges by appealing to the size of the civil settlements the DOJ obtained from the major banks under his tenure. But his case is risible. First, the civil fines, while sounding large, would never be large enough to pose even the slightest risk that the banks’ capital would be impaired, because Holder and White House continue to embrace the too-big-to-fail doctrine, that the responsible banks are too important to the economy to allow the risk of their collapse. Such fines amount to the cost of doing business – a very lucrative one, in fact, for the controlling officers.

Second, the CEOs knew that they could trade off a slightly larger fine in return for complete immunity for themselves and other officers who might otherwise be flipped by federal prosecutors to testify against more senior officers. The fines, of course, would be paid not by the CEOs but by the banks they ran. Indeed, one of the lesser-known aspects of the crisis is that the DOJ almost never sued a banker (as opposed to a bank) and virtually never sought to claw back bankers’ fraud proceeds. It is telling that, as even Holder admitted last week, “A corporation may enter a guilty plea and still see its stock price rise the next day.”

Despite my grave misgivings, I proved too optimistic about Holder. I always thought he would prosecute at least one of the top bankers from the most infamous fraudulent lenders such as Citigroup, Countrywide, Ameriquest or Washington Mutual as a token legacy case. No, Holder refused to indict even one of them for leading any of the megabanks that engaged in fraudulent conduct that devastated the world economy. This is all well known, as I and other observers have explained repeatedly.  What is not as well known, however, is that Holder refused to indict even non-elite financial CEOs, for example, at midsize mortgage banks that specialized in making fraudulent loans. Instead, he prosecuted hundreds of bit players and spread the disgraceful double lie that mortgage fraud was largely an ethnic crime that was committed almost exclusively by primarily ethnic borrowers rather than the officers controlling the lenders. Holder’s legacy in this sphere is that he was the one chasing black, brown and Russian-American mice while white lions roamed free.

One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three.

It’s amazing to me (though perhaps it shouldn’t be) how many dances have signatures of three.

Ok, enough with the doggerel, it was making my head ache anyway.

But it’s true enough that an amazing amount of music written specifically for dancing is in 3/4, 3/8, or 6/8 time (not Rock of course which is relentlessly 4/4, or the Polka in 2/4).  I suppose I should take a moment and explain Time Signatures.

Signatures are a notational convention to let the musician know “how many beats are in each bar and which note value constitutes one beat.”  They look like fractions, but mean something entirely different.  The beats per bar is the first number and can really have any value, bars are a mere divisional convenience (like periods), though they do effect the accenting.  The second number, the note value, is almost uniformly 4 or 8.  This corresponds to the duration of each individual note where open notes without a staff last for 4 beats, open with staff 2, solid with staff 1, solid with staff and a flag 1/2, solid with staff and 2 flags 1/4, etc.

What makes it confusing is that solid with staff is called a quarter note because it conventionally (in 4/4 time) takes up a quarter of the bar and a whole note (open, no staff) takes up a whole bar (I think I’ll have some of Chuck Pierce’s Prestone now).

Anyway how many beats also gives you an idea of how the music is naturally accented.  Common (4/4) time is accented DAH, duh, Dah, duh with the 3rd beat slightly less prominent than the first.  Cut time (think Sousa) the same except twice as fast though it’s easy enough to transpose into a 2/4 Polka but then you lose the inherent subtlety of the 3rd beat as all the down (first) beats are accented the same.  Confused yet?  I sure am.

If the beats per bar are divisible by 3 (3/4, 6/8) each bar is accented DAH, duh, duh (or in the case of 6/8 DAH, duh, duh, Dah, duh, duh).  The 6/8 accenting really gives you a better feel for the rhythm of the music as actually played and while you can duplicate it notationally in any signature with the Triplet, if you’re going to be using it with frequency being divisible by 3 is a time saver.

Personally it’s this coincidence of quarter time and third time in the 6/8 and 12/8 signatures that make them intellectually attractive to me though I’m not a composer, have barely any theory, and as a performer am in the words of the immortal Leonard Falcone himself- “Hopeless.”

One of the defining characteristics of modern and post-modern “art” music is using creative time signatures, eccentric accents, and syncopation to distance itself from this “tyranny of the barline” and Stravinsky was one of the strongest proponents, but you can’t dance to it very well.

Back to dancing.  Wikipedia implicitly likens “classical” dancing to Square Dancing and now that I think about it I can see the parallels.  Performed in groups like a line dance, participants were expected to know the moves with a certain interchangability as opposed to individual efforts like the mosh pit mania of Rock or even the stylized but solo (well, pairs) of contemporary ballroom styles.

Excluding the Polka the 3 most popular types were the Minuet and the Scherzo (an uptempo, long format Minuet), and the Waltz all in 3/4 time.  What made the Waltz particularly scandalous was not really the music, which was actually fairly conventional, but the fact that the dance is performed in the “closed” position where you are looking at your partner and can even give them a squeeze if nobody’s watching.

So this morning I’ve decided to illustrate each of those 3 types and as a bonus I’m including Le Sacre du printemps which was so revolutionary in its noise that it nearly caused a riot.

For a Minuet I’ve chosen a piece by Jean-Baptiste Lully who introduced the trio section to the form.

Menuet pour Trompettes

For a Scherzo I’ve selected a piece by Schubert who finished much more than he left unfinished and along with Beethoven really popularized this format in “art” music.

Scherzo Presto from Symphony #6

And for the Waltz you can’t go wrong with some Johann Strauss.  This is Opus 4, Kettenbrücke-Walzer, about a suspension bridge.

Kettenbrücke-Walzer

Oh, Stravinski.

Those kids.  They’ll listen to any kind of cacophony.

Oblgatories, news, and blogs below.