I wonder about the consequences on humans, when they can’t trust or are not able anymore to decide which facts and sources are truthful and which ones represent attempts to deceive their minds.
Couldn’t the confusion, resulting anger and despair cause mass hysterical and mental pathologies resulting in uncontrolled civil uproar and hatred in an attempt to get rid of the perceived deceiver?
May be the next wars will be the ones that are designed to cause our mental self-destruction.

Posted by: mimi | Sep 8 2007 14:45 utc | 4

All of a sudden, OBL has enough freedom to do get his hair done, get a video made, sent out, and have his picture posted on the internet? He’s able to have all of this done, but our intelligence has no idea where he is? Does our intelligence not know where al-Sahab is based? Or from what IP address this information was uploaded? Geez, I think we need to get a 14-year-old hacker on this!

link

Posted by: DM | Sep 8 2007 15:15 utc | 6

Huh, oops. I meant to post a bit about NPR’s Minitruthiness spewage of the OBL video meme, sans question, sans analysis.

Posted by: catlady | Sep 8 2007 15:55 utc | 8

Lobby Firm Goes To War
This is the Brit version. Any links to the US versions, U$?
By the way, Kurt Nimmo’s coverage of these issues has been consistently excellent.
***********
As far as mere humans are concerned, they have never been able to trust those who control their societies. Technologies have changed, have improved, the stakes have been raised, but the issues have never changed. The rich always want to grow richer, and that means starving and killing the poor and seizing their land and assets.
New World, Native Americans, The Congo, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Palestine, New Orleans, Urban Renewal, Wars for Human Rights, you name it, it doesn’t matter which party is in favor, it doesn’t matter which empire or country is in control — it is the same story. There is only one plot — there are many actors, and many different costumes they wear, and attitudes they affect — and yet, there is only one age-old plot: Take from those who can’t be trusted because they are evil, and give to us who are, by nature, of course, good.
May be the next wars will be the ones that are designed to cause our mental self-destruction.
Why would they want to do that? What they want is control over our mental constructions, which they already have.
Everything we are taught in our society, about US benevolence, about so-called Democracy, about defense, about others, about what constitutes success and happiness, about health and disease, about growth and progress, about the way society must be structured — in ways which provide for our insecurity by NOT answering our most basic needs, while providing for the eternal security of the robber-baron class — everything we are taught in school, is a lie.
Heroes are brave doctors who labor away eternally searching for the “magic bullet” cure for cancer, while enemies are those who cost us jobs, and growth, by opposing ever new nuclear and coal power plants. Heroes wear snappy uniforms with shiny medals and kill others, while enemies labor without recompense to mandate seat-belts in cars, and real enemies question the need for cars.
A lot of money and time has been invested in creating mass mental constructs, group consensus, societal hypnosis: the ability to ignore cognitive dissonance and still slave away to pay the mortgage, eternally.
They don’t want to destroy our mental status, they want to continually enhance it; enhance our viewing pleasure, so to say, enhance our identification with the state, enhance our emotional reactions, our anger and hatred, to their key stimulus/response media. Enhancement is the key to control.
You can’t even buy a slice of pizza these days without undergoing a five-minute radiation dose of FOX, with its hypnotic logos and chirons flashing across our sub-conscious, and its eternal hectoring forcing its way into our super-ego.
The average person I know is totally addicted, as a junkie is, as a baby is to a bottle, to the need for continual emotional mediating of their sub-conscious so that the scary truth does not sink in. The average person cannot go a day without the craving need to watch a movie, view a TV show, leaf through a fashion magazine, read the newspaper — all of which reinforces the mass psychosis we can call Cultural Hegemony.
And those who reinforce this mass psychosis are called actors, and are viewed by society as “cool” and “irreverent” and “rebellious,” and payed a lot of money by those who are even wealthier than them in return for keeping us in a fantasy world, a “Dream State,” for that is what the US is, a dream fantasy Potemkin construction which doesn’t really exist except in our imaginations.
Remember, they create the reality; we just inhabit it.
It is healthy for everyone to spend a month a year without any media, phone, or even photographic images, in order to regain the state of connection to immediate reality, which is the natural state of man, until the development of mass media, bombarding us with an average of one culturally-reinforcing image every five seconds we are awake.
It is we who must cause our own mental self-destruction so that we can deprogram ourselves, disconnect from the emotional mediator bottle, un-brainwash ourselves, and wake up and see the world as it truly is.
This is too scary for most people, as they have never known anything else, any other reality, so they choose to live within the social web of lies.
The alternatives are stark: If you are in the killing zone, die. If you are in the sphere of complicity, then resist and live on crumbs, or give in and be treated to bread and circuses.
The best resisters, the Martin Luther Kings of the world, are gunned down, murdered in their prime, while those who kill enough, the Pinochets, Stroessners, and Bushes of the world, get to die in their sleep at 96, preferably with a young boy by their side, who they are “caring for,” after their family was tragically orphaned.

Backwater
We’re sailing at the edges of time
Backwater
We’re drifting at the waterline
Oh we’re floating in the coastal waters
You and me and the porter’s daughters
Ooh what you do not a sausage can do
And the shorter of the porter’s daughters
Dips her hand in the deadly waters
Ooh what to do in a tiny canoe
Black water
There were six of us but now we are five
We’re all talking
To keep the conversation alive
There was a senator from Ecuador
Who talked about a meteor
That crashed on a hill in the South of Peru
And was found by a conquistador
Who took it to the Emperor
And he passed it on to a Turkish Guru.
His daughter
Was slated for becoming divine
He taught her
He taught her how to split and define
But if you study the logistics
And heuristics of the mystics
You will find that their minds rarely groove in a line
So it’s much more realistic
To abandon such ballistics
And resign to be trapped on a leaf in a vine.

Brian Eno

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 8 2007 16:44 utc | 10

Rick and b,
If you control the root name servers it is quite simple to make a website disappear. You could also put an ACL deny on a boundary router. Does anyone know if you could get to these websites if you entered the dotted decimal address?
This kind of thing happened to al Jazeera some time ago.
Al-Jazeera hobbled by DDOS attack
Freedom Cyber Force Militia

Posted by: dan of steele | Sep 8 2007 17:17 utc | 12

I can’t find it in the archives, but do you guys remember a few years back the terrorist websites traced back to Texas servers?

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 8 2007 17:38 utc | 14

I need to see good screen full vid to make up my mind.
I have followed the poster-boy-terrorist career with gloomy fascination for a long time. I know his voice, his hands, his walk, his shoulders, his speech style, his rhetoric. (I posted one ‘real’ vid here some time back.) And the transcript was, is, absolutely *typical* of Binny, in content, and even in style thru translation. That doesn’t mean much, probably several ppl here could have written it. Difficult though, would take time and a lot of thought. Still, you know that shock of recognition? Yeesss.
The many previous fakes were obvious, lame, clumsy. The fat Binny was the worst, risible.
This is possibly an extremely professional and thought out fake – someone went to an extraordinary amount of trouble, and for what? Or the real thing. ( I can’t quite get my brain around that.)
The black beard means nothing, Binny is, was, an extremely vain man, an international media figure, a TV star, his attractiveness a calling card as well as a matter or personal pride.
The last time Binny was seen alive in the mainstream media, for absolute *certain*, was Jan 01, at his son’s wedding. It was televised, and hit the women’s mags big time. Splendid pix in Marie Claire etc. (Some photos of this wedding on the net have been photoshopped and show a fake Binny in the place of the real one, to give credence, I suppose, to fake Binnys or just to introduce confusion.)
this was at the top of looksmart. Zawahiri was not there afaik. Anyways…
Bin Laden son wedding
Heh, the most wanted man in the US appears on mainstream TV. Maybe the FBI should get together with CNN.

Posted by: Tangerine | Sep 8 2007 18:29 utc | 16

My gawd, youall are making my head spin so I feel like I’m trapped in a Cordwainer Smith story on Alpha Ralpha Boulevard.
It does seem oddly strange that nobody can see this website that put up the video that every news outlet in WestWorld is blathering on about. Meanwhile almost simultaneously in Denmark and Germany this is preceded, as if on cue, terra busts of people with TATP.

Posted by: Chuck Cliff | Sep 8 2007 19:40 utc | 18

@uncle getting the MoA archives into PDF would have to be a complex yet mundane undertaking that will probably require a lot of drudge work sorting the data into shape.
That’s my guess. I’m sure Bernhard is a very systematic person but I know the trouble I have cataloguing and storing my own data. (currently at 1362 optical disks – about 900 are cd’s the rest DVD’s) I’m not systematic at all but I try to be on this one task. The thing is that the state of continuous change or evolution that digital data processes are in means that things don’t stay the same over a timespan. As well as big obvious alterations such as format change, the plethora of little changes makes collating data spanned across the years a really tiresome task.
I’m sure Bernhard will do it when he has time. I don’t wanna stir up a hornets nest so I’ll say this quietly – shsssh – remember the fuss over what happened to a certain site a few weeks ago? Well issues like that prolly make B hesitant to seek outside assistance. That said; if you do want a hand with this or any other drudge work Bernhard, I hope you realise you have only to ask.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Sep 8 2007 22:34 utc | 20

I’m always in two minds about conspiracies, figuring that many of them are just too complex to be real, since complex means many people, and many people means an eventual leak.
However I am maintaining an open mind on this one because, this sort of mis-information has a time factor in it. As we have seen before, the most notable being the Jerry Bruckheimer directed movie of some female amerikan soldier’s ‘rescue’, these time sensitive things aren’t effected by leaks as long as the story remains credible through the targeted news cycles. Afterwards who cares?
In additiion the corporatisation of the pointy end, which is the takeover of actual actions by private enterprise changes things a lot. In the old days the CIA, NSA, US Army or some other alphabet agency would do the pointy end stuff. Sure they might hire private contractors for wet work or whatever they call it outside paperback novels, but that would be under close supervision of some arm of amerika’s official infrastructurte.
That is no longer the case – the beauty of that – aside from the deniability should something go wrong, is that private enterprise is more likely to have everyone ‘reading from the same songsheet’. Even the CIA, and other alphabets have a degree of institutionalisation where some participants don’t all toe the party line. The reasons are complex, maybe I’ll expand that further sometime, because it is that anomaly which many find a frustration about publicly funded and managed institutions, which also makes them wonderful when you least expect it.
As far as the black beard thing goes DM’s post provides a link to a site which includes this scrap also backed by a link:

Under the heading “which things are unlawful in the state of ehraam?” (ehraam means abstinence in Arabic, and refers here to the preparations for making the Hajj—the holy pilgramage)
“(14). To apply hair-dye or to colour the hair with “Wasmah” (a kind of leaves that are used to dye the beard or head) and to apply black-dye is always “Haraam” (unlawful) in normal course of life and in the state of Ehraam such acts are even worse”

IOW bin Laden would blow his credibility as a devout devotee if’n he painted his beard. This may have slipped past the budding Riefenstahls or they had no choice but to go with an older video image of OBL. Somehow I suspect the former, after all amerikan pols do it all the time. Hell I have friends and family who regularly try and hide the grey hairs, it is so common in the west few see it for the deceit it is.
There is no doubt that a lot of the sites around this issue have been more difficult to get to than is normally the case. Persistence pays off but if that was/is deliberate – ie creating a bottleneck on the server that feeds Kurt Nimmo’s blog to the interweb, then that would fit with the acknowledgement that the ruse will be exposed – after it is no longer news.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Sep 8 2007 23:18 utc | 22

debs
i find the whole thing quite ridiculous & the figure – whomever he is – so comic – & so inept that i iamgine that there are buffoons in the homeland protecting business who have nothing better to do with their time than to construct b l videos
timing as always convenient & whomever it is isn’t much of a predicator at all – &ould convince muslims even less than he would westerners
i thought it might be dan rather dressed up as rajaneesh or vice versa

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Sep 9 2007 0:10 utc | 24

MoA’s are entirely too self-absorbed these days.
First a flame war, then a tribute, now a ‘People
Magazine’ thread devoted to obscure cleric OBL.
What, feature an Oprah article next?
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org

Posted by: Flame On | Sep 9 2007 5:03 utc | 26

Appropriate to the title of the post, Prop-Agenda:
Here’s a story about how easy it is for the FBI to listen in on phone calls in the US. Not about legality, just how to push a button and listen, log originating and receiving phone numbers, send for translation and analysis.
Another article I read via slashdot implied that the system has trouble with Skype, portable phone numbers and I think obfuscation of the caller ID data.
Is this credible, or is there a reason to present this info in Wired.com, a mainstream magazine’s blog.
Along the same lines there is much speculation about the leak of the B52 armed with 6 nuclear-tipped cruise missiles landing at Barksdale air base, the launch pad for bombing in the middle east. Was it serving an agenda (seems obvious) if so what is the intention of the message, etc.
The US policy is control of all battle spaces, earth sea air space and informational, so we will probably see a lot more of this as time goes on.
Denial of service to websites and networks has been going on for a while, and the storm worm has been estimated to have infected millions of defenceless computers connected to the Internet.
Control of these masses of computers lets spammers use them to send out spam email, or send destructive data packets to targeted servers which fail due to all the incoming requests — this is called Denial of Service aka DoS attacks.
So Dan of Steel gave us a new idea, maybe this unprecedented spam network isn’t just for spam — it could be someone else at the controls.
Although we are using the Internet to communicate, there are varying levels of understanding about how this stuff works, how it can be exploited or shut down by hackers and so on. Bernhard, Dan of Steel and quite a few others here are experts.
Let’s listen to them … hope this post is considered on topic.
As for Bin Ladin, I was really pissed off at him when I was told he arranged the attacks of September 2001. Now I’m not so sure, but he sure is a polarizing figure. Now we’re all talking about him as if he was Madonna or OJ Simpson.
If you squint your eyes just right the whole thing takes on a shiny unreal yet entertaining slant, worthy of some of our favorite writers and filmmakers.
Maybe it’s the result of science fiction being taught in university liberal arts programs — imagine some ambitious fellow studying media and speculative fiction rather than economics and management. And then getting a job in the propaganda department rather than going into marketing. With a budget!

Posted by: jonku | Sep 9 2007 5:53 utc | 28

@Flame On
I’ve gotten and been on ‘Words WIthout Borders’ mailing list /Newsletter for years, that is where I first heard of Khushwant Singh’s wonderful book ‘Train To Pakistan’, other than, the Literature from the “Axis of Evil”: reading guide, what’s your point?
Oh, and we are not your enemies here, so you might want to Flame off.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 9 2007 7:38 utc | 30

@ malooga 10
I am overwhelmed by your comment. I don’t see that we disagree at all, I am just not capable of expressing myself like you do.

May be the next wars will be the ones that are designed to cause our mental self-destruction.
Why would they want to do that? What they want is control over our mental constructions, which they already have.

and

They don’t want to destroy our mental status, they want to continually enhance it; enhance our viewing pleasure, so to say, enhance our identification with the state, enhance our emotional reactions, our anger and hatred, to their key stimulus/response media. Enhancement is the key to control.

and

The average person I know is totally addicted, as a junkie is, as a baby is to a bottle, to the need for continual emotional mediating of their sub-conscious so that the scary truth does not sink in. The average person cannot go a day without the craving need to watch a movie, view a TV show, leaf through a fashion magazine, read the newspaper — all of which reinforces the mass psychosis we can call Cultural Hegemony.

What you described in these three paragraphs is what I meant by mental self-destruction. Addiction is self-destructive, is dependency and finally enslavement. I am aware of who are masters and the pimps and what are the drugs. The real war is not the one against drugs and for independence, but a war to secure the drug’s continuous supply and consequent enslavement through addiction. In that sense I see this to be a war “designed to cause our mental self-destruction”. And this

so to say, enhance our identification with the state, enhance our emotional reactions, our anger and hatred, to their key stimulus/response media. Enhancement is the key to control.

hits it head-on. Constant enhancement of our anger and hatred will lead in the end to real genocides, not only mental dependency.
You start out with having been already mentally destructed, I started out with “still being healthy”, but constantly assaulted with the intent of making us emotionally addicted and mentally enslaved. I think we mean the same thing.
You can express yourself amazingly well, what a comment, makes me dizzy. Thanks and sorry for coming back that late to it.

Posted by: mimi | Sep 9 2007 21:34 utc | 32

Osama Bin Laden’s widely publicized video address to the American people has a peculiarity that casts serious doubt on its authenticity: the video freezes at about 1 minute and 36 seconds, and motion only resumes again at 12:30. The video then freezes again at 14:02 remains frozen until the end. All references to current events, such as the 62nd anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Japan, and Sarkozy and Brown being the leaders of France and the UK, respectively, occur when the video is frozen! The words spoken when the video is in motion contain no references to contemporary events and could have been (and likely were) made before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The audio track does appear to be in the voice of a single speaker. What I suspect was done is that an older, unreleased video was dubbed over for this release, with the video frozen when the audio track departed from that of the original video.

Link

Posted by: DM | Sep 10 2007 8:35 utc | 34

Is ‘Osama Bin Laden’ & ‘Al Qaeda’ the Modern Incarnation of ‘Emmanuel Goldstein’?
The latest tape is obviously a blatant fraud. Would the real osama please stand up.
It would seem the real Osama is long since dead. However, Emmanuel Goldstein lives on.
Please, download it and view it critically yourself … don’t accept the soundbites, carefully co-ordinated ‘interception’ and pre-release articles and subsequent ‘analysis’ of this fraud by the Intelligence services and the MSM …
The diatribe on the latest fake does not align with the stated aims and objectives of Al-Qaeda … it’s childish tripe … jeez, Al-Qaeda is going to waste it’s time bemoaning the level of taxes on U.S. Citizens in a major announcement ?! Excuse me while I *puke*.
Who benefits ?
Why is this pathetic, yet co-ordinated fakery utterly unchallenged in the media ?
Surreal … reality is becoming difficult to discern under such circumstances … at least the chocolate ration was just increased from 50 to 40 grams 🙁
A democracy ? *barf* Goebbels would have been in rapturous awe of the level of manipulation of the public.
PS Lurk from time to time … Salut Bernhard.
Best wishes to all at MOA, especially ‘you know who’ … just could not help myself re this pathetic BULLSHIT.

Posted by: Outraged | Sep 10 2007 14:21 utc | 36

New Bin Laden Fake tape, propaganda for all brainwashed West people
A chronology of societal manipulation.

Posted by: Outraged | Sep 10 2007 14:50 utc | 38

Binny been dead for years. Interesting though that someone would take the trouble. These things count. Very smooth (for once) effort.
What, today, is fake? John Wayne is long dead (I suppose) and his presence is still appreciated.
It is fine for leftist posters and others to cry ‘fake’ – rightly so – but that does not touch how ppl are affected or what they come to believe.
9/11 was ultimate fakery, an unprecedented media spoof – (ppl did die, apologies to the victim’s families) – but 9/11 generally does not come under the sharp gaze of political pundits, they don’t try to distinguish the ‘fake’ (false media reports, pix, etc.) from the ‘real’ – whatever they saw, thought, apprehended, are sure of, can take as established fact.
Binny – as poster boy terrarist since 90 or so, TV star, provides fodder for the mill, an easy discussion point, as others are avoided, and personalization serves the PTB. (Saddam, Milosevic, Iranian Pres, etc.) I myself am a victim of that hype.
He still is the ultimate culprit in the mainstream media for 9/11, without any factual basis at all. It is all a movie show for sheeples; its very tentativeness, confusion, sketchiness, lame fakes, half hearted or absent facts, hysterical accusations, seems to suffice, or even reinforce, the identification of the ‘villain.’
The point is that it takes little, or nothing much, to get the ppl on board; the triviality and shodiness of it all is a mark of its success. Bad movie, incredible plot, stereotyped characters, improbable faked events, boom and blast, shock and awe…fine…
Latest quote from a mainstream American: “I’m good! Good with that.”
Meaning, Binny as the ultimate evil.

Posted by: Tangerine | Sep 10 2007 18:59 utc | 40

I watched the video (it took seven hours to download). It seemed to me that what “Bin Laden” said could have been written by anyone on this blog, who also believed in Islam, provided the translation was accurate. I guess they want to discredit very basic and obvious left-wing views, and associate Chomsky with Bin Laden in the tiny minds of the sheep. It was strange to see “BL” tick off the names of more US politicians than the average wing-nut ever could. It was clearly not targeted to his constituency, but to the US market. Basically, it was pretty boring. BL could use a Western PR pro if he actually wants anyone from the West to watch this stuff. I can’t imagine many 30-second attention span Americans sitting through it. I drifted off once or twice, despite my many years of Zen meditation.
BL had a gold ring on his right pinkie. Which of his many wives was that for?

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 11 2007 0:38 utc | 42

You owe me a new computer screen for that one, r’giap, I spit up all over the old one;-)))))))))))))))))

Posted by: Malooga | Sep 11 2007 0:54 utc | 44

empirical hubris? or deliberate propagenda?
michael scheuer

The September 7 release of a new video statement by Osama bin Laden puts to rest, at least for now, widespread speculation that he is dead, retired or has been pushed aside by his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
With a newly trimmed and dyed beard, comfortable robes rather than a camouflage jacket, and a clear and patient speaking style, bin Laden achieved a major purpose of his speech before he said a word: he clearly showed Muslims and Americans that he was still alive, that he was healthy and not at death’s door, that he spoke from secure surroundings unthreatened by the US-led coalition in Afghanistan, and that he, al-Qaeda and their allies were ready to continue the war.
As usual, this message was wrapped in an as-Sahab Productions video displaying high-level production values.

Posted by: b real | Sep 12 2007 18:11 utc | 46