Fascinating reads in Global Post and the Washington Post about the history and location of one of the CIA’s infamous black sites in Poland during the early years of GWOT.
Check out other reporting about black sites from the New Yorker, the Daily Beast, and the New York Review of Books.
There’s a fascinating and chilling writeup in Rolling Stone about the online sleuths who were hunting Luka Magnotta for uploading a video of himself killing kittens, BEFORE he went on to kill a Chinese college student. They figured out his identity and location and went to police and animal welfare officials with their evidence, only to be told they wouldn’t mobilize because his victims were cats. The article points out the correlation between animal abuse and serial killers. Perhaps most infuriating of all was Magnotta’s motivation for pretty much everything he did in his adult life: a desire to be famous, or infamous. Read the entire thing here.
The Malaysia Airlines 370 story keeps getting stranger… The latest in the New York Times:
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — The investigation into the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has shifted to include anyone on board with a navigation or aircraft background in response to evidence that the plane was deliberately diverted from its route and, after communication was lost, navigated by someone with deep experience at the controls.
“In view of this latest development, the Malaysian authorities have refocused their investigation into the crew and passengers on board,” Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia said at a news conference on Saturday.
This new phase of the investigation has brought new scrutiny to the lives of two people who certainly had those skills: the pilot and first officer, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, and Fariq Abdul Hamid, 27, both Malaysian citizens — although neither has been declared a suspect in the plane’s disappearance. Investigators are also apparently searching the passenger list for anyone else with similar skills who might have rerouted the plane, willfully or under coercion.
During 9/11 and the immediate aftermath, U.S. intelligence was able to piece together fairly quickly who the hijackers were and establish their ties to al Qaeda, based on passenger manifests and phone calls from the hijacked planes. In this case, there have been no communications from the hijacked plane, so intelligence officials and presumably the media only have the passenger manifests to work with. If there is any conclusive proof that a passenger or crew member had means and motive to do something like this, it should turn up fairly quickly due to the considerable investigative resources being put into this by multiple governments and news organizations.
There is a long and infamous history of airplane hijackings around the world, with many of the most famous cases happening during the 1960s and 1970s. The tactical appeal of airplane hijackings can be summed up in two reasons: 1) mobility to go wherever the hijackers want, and 2) inaccessability and inescapability. Nobody will be able to storm a plane or try to get off it while it’s in the air – with exceptions to Steven Seagal and D.B. Cooper. The conventional wisdom of airplane hijackings – that the hijackers are taking hostages to achieve a rational political objective with an outcome that would ensure their own survival – was turned on its head by the events of 9/11.
If it was a hijacking, the deviation from the norm from hijackings of the past as of this writing is the lack of anybody claiming responsibility or making some type of political demand or other in exchange for the safety of the hostages. Assuming the Central Asia flight path theory is correct, that might help narrow the nationality or political agenda of possible suspects.
One scenario that I had considered a possibility – but has seemingly been ruled out at this point – is something akin to the Payne Stewart crash: that the aircraft lost cabin pressurization and kept flying off course until it ran out of fuel and crashed in the water somewhere.
Hi folks… Long time no see! I’ve been a bit busy with the Alice in Chains book, as well as a few other things in the short and long term, so blogging has been infrequent, to put it mildly. Work on the book is coming along nicely – I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel! Hopefully it’s not an oncoming train… Publication is tentatively scheduled for late 2014/early 2015, but I will make an announcement once the book is in the can and a date is set in stone.
A lot’s been happening in the world in recent times, so I will start picking up the pace a bit on this end, especially as work on the book winds down.
Hope all is well!
In a single frame, cartoonist Milt Priggee manages to describe the situation over Syria:
Reminds me of this scene from a John Woo movie. I nominate John Travolta for the role of Assad.
According to J.M. Berger, Al Qaeda has taken to Twitter to solicit feedback for media ops using the hashtag اقتراحك_لتطوير_اﻹعلام_الجهادي (which, when run through Google translator, comes out as “Suggestion _ development _ Media _ jihadist”), which is now being spammed with parody tweets by Berger and others. Click on the hashtag in Berger’s tweet to watch the fun.
I’m not a Yankees fan by any stretch of the imagination, but LIFE Magazine dug up some amazing previously unpublished color photos of Babe Ruth, taken a few months before his death in 1948. Check them out.
Update: Worth noting is the fact that today is the 65th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s death, hence the reason LIFE is publishing these photos.
The Daily Beast reporting today:
The crucial intercept that prompted the U.S. government to close embassies in 22 countries was a conference call between al Qaeda’s senior leaders and representatives of several of the group’s affiliates throughout the region.
The intercept provided the U.S. intelligence community with a rare glimpse into how al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, manages a global organization that includes affiliates in Africa, the Middle East, and southwest and southeast Asia.
Several news outlets reported Monday on an intercepted communication last week between Zawahiri and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the leader of al Qaeda’s affiliate based in Yemen. But The Daily Beast has learned that the discussion between the two al Qaeda leaders happened in a conference call that included the leaders or representatives of the top leadership of al Qaeda and its affiliates calling in from different locations, according to three U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence. All told, said one U.S. intelligence official, more than 20 al Qaeda operatives were on the call.
To be sure, the CIA had been tracking the threat posed by Wuhayshi for months. An earlier communication between Zawahiri and Wuhayshi delivered through a courier was picked up last month, according to three U.S. intelligence officials. But the conference call provided a new sense of urgency for the U.S. government, the sources said.
Al Qaeda members included representatives or leaders from Nigeria’s Boko Haram, the Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda in Iraq, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and more obscure al Qaeda affiliates such as the Uzbekistan branch. Also on the call were representatives of aspiring al Qaeda affiliates such as al Qaeda in the Sinai Peninsula, according to a U.S. intelligence official. The presence of aspiring al Qaeda affiliates operating in the Sinai was one reason the State Department closed the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, according to one U.S. intelligence official. “These guys already proved they could hit Eilat. It’s not out of the range of possibilities that they could hit us in Tel Aviv,” the official said.
Al Qaeda leaders had assumed the conference calls, which give Zawahiri the ability to manage his organization from a remote location, were secure. But leaks about the original intercepts have likely exposed the operation that allowed the U.S. intelligence community to listen in on the al Qaeda board meetings.
Fascinating read, but I’m surprised al Qaeda would get one – let alone multiple – leader on a conference call, given the NSA’s well-documented technical capabilities in hacking or intercepting electronic communications even before the Edward Snowden leaks. Given the relentless pressure being placed on them by U.S. and allied military and intelligence services, I would assume they’d resort to paper and smoke signals for their communications from here on out.
As a child of the 80s, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out my favorite quote from the story:
“This was like a meeting of the Legion of Doom,” one U.S. intelligence officer told The Daily Beast, referring to the coalition of villains featured in the Saturday morning cartoon Super Friends.
Anybody who’s ever been to a Washington Nationals home game is familiar with the race of the presidents that takes place at some point during each game. Nats fans are also familiar with Teddy Roosevelt usually losing the race because of some calamity or other, a situation not unlike Charlie Brown and the football. The last time I went to a Nats game, it was a Sharknado that body blocked the other four presidents, which effectively gave the race to Abe Lincoln.
Well, here’s a new one, courtesy of the Nationals’ Tumblr blog:
And if you haven’t seen David Ortiz’s meltdown from a few nights ago, you absolutely must:
Icepicks and Nukes 