Moon of Alabama Brecht quote
August 7, 2013
Sources: NSA Invited To Al Qaeda Conference Call

The Daily Beast has a scoop (slightly modified):

It wasn’t just any terrorist message that triggered U.S. terror alerts and embassy closures—but a conference call of more than 20 far-flung al Qaeda operatives, Eli Lake and Josh Rogin report.

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.


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. Also attending the call were Charles Mason, Elvis, Karl Marks and the NSA.

Sources explained that the call was conducted via strings tied to aluminum tubes.

So the intelligence people thought it useful to tell the public exactly how Al Qaeda communicates? What’s the next nonsense they will try to sell to the public? The San Fransisco-Honolulu bridge?

Comments

This sounds to me like another example of Israeli ventriloquism. The supposed “US intelligence officials” are actually Israelis. Look at this:

The presence of aspiring al Qaeda affiliates operating in the Sinai was one reason the State Department closed the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, according to one US 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.

It’s not the way US officials talk or even think. It’s Israeli ventriloquism.

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 7 2013 14:33 utc | 1

Or you could just say it’s a piece of GOP confabulation. Lake & Rogin took care to get extended Obama-bashing money quotes from McCain (who is in Egypt right now) before they published it.

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 7 2013 14:44 utc | 2

It’s Charles Manson not Charles Mason. And, what does the author of The Complete a**Hole’s Guide to Handling Chicks have to do with this?

Posted by: blowback | Aug 7 2013 14:49 utc | 3

When the majority of Joe Public in the West and for that matter most every where in the world are so gullible, governments will keep their fantasy propaganda levels at Code Orange. Of course nothing like keeping the fear level all ratcheted up to keep the sheep on the range.

Posted by: ab initio | Aug 7 2013 15:50 utc | 4

the Yemenis appear to be reading from a script of their own:

Yemen claims it foiled AQ plot to take over key cities, blow up gas facilities
AP, Aug 7 2013
SANA’A – A Yemeni government spokesman claims authorities have foiled a plot by AQ militants aimed at taking control of two cities in the country, then storming strategic ports and bombing gas facilities. Rageh Badi said Wednesday that the terror network planned to target the southern cities of Mukalla, the capital of Hadramawt province, and Bawzeer, then send its members disguised in military uniform to attack two strategic oil ports. He says other AQ militants, meanwhile, would try to sabotage pipelines to “create panic among Yemeni army and Yemeni security services.”

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 7 2013 16:12 utc | 5

Moving right along on the arrant nonsense theme…
Intelligence Officials Can’t Keep Story Straight: Snowden Both Did And Did Not Get Key NSA Secrets
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130725/11243223944/intelligence-officials-cant-keep-story-straight-snowden-both-did-did-not-get-key-nsa-secrets.shtml
The comments are appropriately pithy and a couple of the stories headlined below this one rub salt into the NSA’s wounds.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 7 2013 16:18 utc | 6

There’s a mildly sadistic undertone to this campaign to force people to believe things that nobody but an idiot could possibly find credible.
But the general impression is one of complete incompetence and crudity: putting up the President to tell this tale to Jay Leno must have been the work of someone foolish enough to believe that the rest of the world is equally stupid. Bush’s stunts, such as landing a plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier, are beginning to look dignified by comparison with Obama’s trickery.
The old maxim that military intelligence is a contradiction in terms, is constantly reinforced. One almost pities the capitalists who invest in the corporations that trade on the brains and connections of Colonel Cathcart and the other tired old careerists who run the intelligence services.

Posted by: bevin | Aug 7 2013 18:32 utc | 7

Mildly off topic…
TomDispatch’s latest (Aug 6) is on the theme of Spying For Us.
Here’s the crux:

Manning and Snowden each believed that the release of classified documents in his possession would empower us, the people, and lead us to question what was being done by the national security state in our name but without our knowledge. In other words, if they were spies, then they were spying on the government for us.
They were, that is, insiders embedded in a vast, increasingly secretive structure that, in the name of protecting us from terrorism, was betraying us in a far deeper way. Both men have been termed “traitors” (Manning in military court), while Congressman Peter King called Snowden a “defector,” a Cold War term no longer much in use in a one-superpower world. Such words, too, would need new definitions to fit our present reality.
In a sense, Manning and Snowden could be said to have “defected” — from the U.S. secret government to us. However informally or individually, they could nonetheless be imagined as the people’s spies. What their cases indicate is that, in this country, the lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key crime of the century is now to spy on the U.S. for us.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 7 2013 18:50 utc | 8

former spook leader Michael Hayden spilled the truth yesterday: he fears “hackers” who don’t get enough hetero-sex and want to harm “America” which he conflates with “dot-mil”s. they are plotting terrorist attacks on The Government, but The Government will get them.
in his mind, the war is the elite who run a secret powerful empire against ITS OWN PEOPLE.
can we at least cut off his health care benefits? his pension? what other welfare are we handing him and his creepers? and how about all of congress? they lie to us and we still hand them every dime we have.
someday somebody should walk through the lobbies of DC and show them the numbers. the lobbyists they prostitute for do NOT pay their pensions, health care forever, send their kids to Yale, and fly them on fancy jets. someday…

Posted by: anon | Aug 7 2013 19:18 utc | 9

Obama: ‘We Don’t Have A Domestic Spying Program’. Well, I’m glad that’s settled…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 7 2013 19:23 utc | 10

Cry-Baby Obama (who ‘Enjoys Being A Girl, like his friends Cameron & Sarkozy) has decided he’s not up to the job of meeting face-to-face with He-Man Vlad – suggesting, imo, that he/she got a proper dressing-down from Vlad at their previous meeting. Don’t be surprised if Putin’s response is curt, and along the lines of “Tell someone who cares!”

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 7 2013 19:41 utc | 11

Horsy, you’ll be able to judge this collection of rumours regarding what Bandar said to Putin better than I:
http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCABRE9760OQ20130807

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 7 2013 20:00 utc | 12

Members of the dissident IRA factions in Ireland were also invited to take part in the conference call. But they ran out of twenty pence coins half way through and the connection was lost.

Posted by: Ed | Aug 7 2013 23:15 utc | 13

@ RB. You mean this Reuters (yawn)…
Syrian opposition sources close to Saudi Arabia said Prince Bandar offered to buy up to $15 billion of Russian weapons as well as…
A senior Syrian opposition figure said there had been a “build-up of Russian-Saudi contacts prior to the meeting”.

or this Reuters?
Putin’s initial response to Bandar’s offer was inconclusive, diplomats say. One Western diplomat in the Middle East said the Russian leader was unlikely to trade Moscow’s recent high profile in the region for an arms deal, however substantial.
He said Russian officials also appeared skeptical that Saudi Arabia had a clear plan for stability in Syria if Assad fell.

To which one could add – Russia can’t afford to back down because they’re on the Yankee list of countries to be regime-changed. This helps explain Russia’s reluctance to engage in megaphone diplomacy, because they might just have to back up their bluster – which the World’s 2nd ex-superpower is clearly incapable of doing with Putin’s Russia locked & loaded and on Yellow Alert.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 7 2013 23:21 utc | 14

If there is any truth at all in the Reuters report, then Bandar is even more incompetent than the record shows him to be.
Offering to buy tanks, for Christ’s sake. Does he think Putin would be looking for a secret commission?
And offering to cut Russia in on the gas market!
The Russians must have found it hard to keep straight faces. The wonder is that Reuters can.

Posted by: bevin | Aug 8 2013 0:48 utc | 15

Of course, that whole “story” is pure bullsh*t. Al Ciada might as well have asked politely whether they could use a conference room in the zusa embassy.
Funnily enough there *are*, of course, ways to communicate without nsa having the slightest chance of knowing or understanding. But stupid as those ragheads are, they make a conference call. Sure.
The interesting question, of course, is what’s really behind it. The “They could attack in Sinai so, hell, they might as well get us in tel aviv” line might, stupid as it sounds, tell us something. For a starter that means that israel is *not* a secure place for zusa to be. Strange.
Considering the fact that that whole Al Ciada thing is one big false flag my guess is that the americans are afraid of israel staging a false flag in an arab country blaming it on Iran or Syria to keep the heat up.
Strange as it may sound it seems quite possible that zusa is finally turning against israel, having understood that israel and its eternal war mongering and meddling in internal zusa policy is the single biggest rock on zusas way way back to a halfway normal nation and recovery.
Again, I know that sounds strange. But think. dempsey told israel more than once in rather clear words that the zusa military doesn’t want to fight any more wars for them. And now obama quite firmly puts a two state solution on the table that is, he puts as a given what israel tries to negate since its very existence.
While something in my head shrieks “incredible!” I also remember that “jewish” and “zionist” is by no means identical. This became very clear during Nazi-Germany with basically two jewish factions holding clearly opposing positions. One, the classical jewish faction strived for survival above all while the other one, the zionists, actually often colaborated with the Nazi (other times opposing them) going for one goal and one goal only and above all, the creation of israel.
It should be understood (and I think many jews do understand that) that thevast majority of non-jews doesn’t differentiate that much. To them, “jewish”, “zionist”, and “israel” are basically one and the same leading to many situations where jews gets punished for (yet more) zionist/israel crimes.
Just imagine the day when israel were terminated (and quite consequentially, the zusa regime broke apart); chances are that millions of people went on the street and killed jews whereever they found them.
Many are absolutely sure that obama is just another zionist puppet. After all, wasn’t he groomed and sponsored and put into power by influential and rich jews? I’m not so sure. After all there are, I assume, many jews in zusa who clearly recognize israel, aipac & co as a possibly vital danger to themselves.
This, of course, is just a hypothesis and by no means the only one, possibly not even a strong one.
Some argue that Russia has become, surprisingly for many, a major superpower, actually one that is militarily stronger than zusa and one with a brilliant leader with integrity. And right they are, no doubts. But then, while the factor Putin explains a lot, it does not explain, why a black man wih little more than an admittedly great talent to seduce, lure and manipulate the dumbed down american masses, became president, won the internal fighting against ultra-zionist mass-murder-is-fun hillary, and became president a second time, having a rather loyal and hand-picked team in his second term after – with considerable elegance – shutting down petraeus, clinton and others.
Now if, just suppose, if zusa finally turned against israel, wouldn’t it seem logical to use Al Ciada?

Posted by: Mr. Pragma | Aug 8 2013 2:07 utc | 16

I think maybe they’ve confused Al Qaeda for the Legion of Doom.

Posted by: Dr. Wellington Yueh | Aug 8 2013 2:43 utc | 17

If there’s any hidden treasure in Reuters’ Putin/Bandar piece, @ 11 & 13 above, it is this:
One Western diplomat in the Middle East said the Russian leader was unlikely to trade Moscow’s recent high profile in the region for an arms deal, however substantial.
Now…
(a) Which ME country considers itself and its ‘diplomats’ to be Western?
(b) And which habitually noisy, high profile, ME country has had to slink out of the limelight because both Obama and Putin told its PM to stop being a buffoon, and to stfu?
(c) And which ME country would be so miffed about having to stfu that it would become obsessed with the imposed silence rendering it incapable of resisting the urge to whine about it (however obliquely) at any and every opportunity – no matter how irrelevant?
(d) … and then accuse Putin of clinging to a “recent high profile” at any cost?

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 8 2013 3:36 utc | 18

Dr. Yueh @16:
I had a similar thought, but mine involved a meeting held by a man filmed from the neck down while he stroked a cat in his lap. At some point, he would say “You know the price of failure” and flip a switch near his desk which would open a trap door beneath one of the attendees’ seats.
Nor do I think it’s coincidence that we both felt the narrative was cartoonish/pop culturish. I just looked on Google, but I wasn’t able to find the comic book the US Government issued to its GIs during World War II to explain the US presence. The official rationale given for issuing it was almost– but not quite– that servicemen were too stupid to have things explained to them any other way. Today, it’s the general populace that are given the same treatment… from “ticking time bomb” scenarios lifted from scripts of movies and television starring Bruce Willis or Kiefer Sutherland, the most inane (but imminently accessible)”arguments” are immediately swallowed by people (probably)due to familiarity and normalization.
I suppose there’s a chicken-and-egg discussion to be had here about whether pop culture is so binary and easily digestible because it’s used by governments to force feed messages to the people, or whether governments just use it as a go-to resource because it is already binary and easily digestible. In either case, it is no accident that the hacks who assembled this particular narrative went for the most obvious and over-the-top supervillain imagery that they could paint.

Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 8 2013 3:39 utc | 19

And, after a moment’s reflection, I would like to place my name in the running for the Captain Obvious Medal for my above comment.

Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 8 2013 3:48 utc | 20

@ 18. re WWII comic book.
Something like this?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/43226903/WWII-1943-Marine-Corps-Comic-Book

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 8 2013 4:03 utc | 21

@Hoarsewhisperer #20
That wasn’t the one I was thinking of. The one I saw was much shorter on action scenes and involved two grunts standing around chatting about the US mission in Europe with all the talking points in boldface font. Your version is actually a lot more entertaining.
I am entirely unable to find it anywhere on the web now, but it came coupled with the patronizing rationale that the US’s mission needed to be explained to servicemen in terms they could understand. It must have worked well because the policy continued unabated while the meta-exposition became more subtle.

Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 8 2013 4:49 utc | 22

It wasn’t this one… but it was close.
And before I’m accused of threadjacking while I’m trying to track this down, I believe that comics and propaganda are absolutely germane to this discussion as the MSM has turned into the concept of the latest summer blockbuster writ large.

Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 8 2013 5:14 utc | 23

@ 21.
Oops. Missed it by THAT much (as Max Smart would say).
If it starts keeping you awake at night I used ‘US Army-issue WWII comic book’
as the search string.
There was a vast qty of that stuff around. Disney did a lot. I have a glossy archive book of Norman Lindsay War Cartoons (he’s most famous for his simple beautifully fluid outline pen sketches of batches of scrumptious, generously-proportioned naked women in raunchy, and genteel Mythical, settings).
Googling ‘US Army-issue WWII Europe comic book’ turned up some interesting options, but a specific book is a bit needle-in-haystack-ish.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Aug 8 2013 5:50 utc | 24

About the ‘Legion of Doom’ events, as Marcy Wheeler now calls them: I think quite simply that the NSA leaked a Yemeni lead into AQAP (actually CIA, since AQAP is all CIA false-flag operatives), (a) because NSA wanted some good publicity for its own effectiveness at communications interception, albeit bogus, and (b) because it knew the CIA could not contradict it without risking the exposure of its false-flag AQAP network in Yemen.

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 8 2013 6:01 utc | 25

The real reason for the conference call:
http://therealnews.com/t2/component/hwdvideoshare/viewvideo/76713

Posted by: ben | Aug 8 2013 6:25 utc | 26

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 7, 2013 12:12:34 PM | 4
harry says its still early days and planes and trains are off the list not so for ships.and not camels either but real ships with flammable materials on board.false flag indeed as ships do fly flags so that needs to be considered.ships carrying gas are probably the one,s to watch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_carrier

Posted by: jub | Aug 8 2013 8:45 utc | 27

Marcy Wheeler (Emptywheel) has a theory that this is related to the revelation of the NSA exploit of the TOR internet encryption system. In other words, she thinks Zawahiri and the Legion of Doom were communicating by TOR and the NSA managed to sneak in and eversdrop on them. This is the first time to my knowledge that the incredibly intelligent Marcy has fallen into a booby trap:
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/08/07/what-if-the-tor-takedown-relates-to-the-yemeni-alert/

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 8 2013 9:17 utc | 28

I suppose I mean TOR anonymisation system, not TOR encryption system, but mere anonymisation is not enough if you want to discuss the details of planned terrorist acts, is it? Anyway, this is her paraphrase of Keith Alexander’s speech at BlackHat:

terrorists … terrorism … terrorist attacks … counterterrorism … counterterrorism … terrorists … counterterrorism … terrorist organizations … terrorist activities … terrorist … terrorist activities … counterterrorism nexus … terrorist actor … terrorist? … terrorism … terrorist … terrorists … imminent terrorist attack … terrorist … terrorist-related actor … another terrorist … terrorist-related activities … terrorist activities … stopping terrorism … future terrorist attacks … terrorist plots … terrorist associations
[snip]
Sitting among you are people who mean us harm

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 8 2013 9:24 utc | 29

@Hoarsewhisperer #23 “…a specific book is a bit needle-in-haystack-ish.”
Well, the obvious solution, then, is for me to simply get a bigger haystack. It’s an old bit of time-worn folk-wisdom that we just made up.

Posted by: Monolycus | Aug 8 2013 9:46 utc | 30

I strongly doubt the TOR story. For a simple reason: TOR is known not to be trustworthy since many years; there have been many problems with compromised or honeytrap exit nodes.
There are better ways to communicate. As a simple example just consider the fact that one can buy hundreds and thousands of cracked PCs spread all over the world for relatively small money.
Second, one can buy cheap mobile phones and prepaid cards to exchange critical (but small) pieces of information in the form of innocent looking SMS. Again, just a simple example: Please, let me know your phone number in (some city) just in case there is a problem with the dog, ok. Have fun and regards to Katie and the kids (where 2nd floor is a distraction). This could be used to communicate a 10 digit number (degree/minute geo-coordinates) which again might be used as a key to more information which then tells e.g. the IP address of a server, a login, and a passphrase.
While this could be principally analysed/cracked/understood that would take quite some time and, more importantly, using 2 channels of communication, it would be very hard to relate. Even if it was cracked, the agencies would be way to late.
And this was just a painfully simple example.
Which might also be an interesting angle to look at the current nsa problem. In reality nsa’s chance to get the relevant information and in time rapidly decreases toward zero when they are dealing with professionals. Actually, the ones nsa can get at are per definition amateurs and with extremely high probability low level cases that weren’t in nsa’s jurisdiction (or focus) anyway.
Sure, nsa probably has the means to collect pretty everything that gets communicated – but that is a weakness, too; there is only so much detail one can process with any processing capability of whatever power. On the other side, professional bad guys can quite arbitrarily increase the cost of operation. Using, for example two not in any way related channels of communication, does not double but rather quadruple the efforts necessary to crack it. Furthermore, one can use other factors such as time (a certain information is available only at a certain time and for a certain period.
That whole terrorism excuse blabla is just that, blabla. prism and the like are clearly and provably targeting the mass of normal citizens.

Posted by: Mr. Pragma | Aug 8 2013 10:48 utc | 31

Mr P, I think you have confirmed two of my beliefs in one comment, which is nice: first, the TOR story is silly, uncharactistically so for Marcy Wheeler, who is generally very careful and almost lawyerly in her inferences; second, the NSA is not very likely to have intercepted or in any way picked up anything related to al-Qaeda, in Yemen or anywhere else. I think the real cause of the current flap is (a) a genuine warning from Yemen to the CIA, based on information from Yemeni informers on the fringes of AQAP (whether AQAP is genuine or CIA-created is immaterial); second, the NSA, presumably with White House and National Security Council approval, seized control of the resulting alert and converted it into a propaganda fabrication intended to show how wonderful and essential the NSA’s interception abilities are. This has angered the Yemenis, who have now staged an enormous, full-dress alert. It has also angered the CIA, which is unleashing barrages of drones on dissident tribesmen.

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 8 2013 13:12 utc | 32

Eli Lake, one of the authors of the “conference call” piece admitted on Twitter that there was no “conference call” at all. Just some form of communication that the NSA allegedly listened to.
Earlier Eli Lake was at the Washington Times and a reliable Zionist anti-Iran loudmouth. I guess that were he learned to lie.

Posted by: b | Aug 8 2013 13:52 utc | 33

Uncle $cam @ 9 — Re: Obama saying the US does not have a domestic spying program.
If you carefully parse the weasel wording, Obama might believe he’s telling the truth, in that the US has global spying program(s) which just happens to include the US. So, technically, it’s not a specific domestic spying program.
Yeah, that’s the ticket….
For those looking at the big picture, no matter what you call it the US government is indeed spying domestically, as much as it can and often focusing on any groups which might grow enough to cause people to really look at the current government and what it is doing. Occupy Wall Street got incredible attention from the spies and the spooks and, later the “company goons,” aka the local militarized police, with some DHS goons tossed in to oversee things. WH conference calls and all to get the mayors on board and on schedule.
Latest story of today’s domestic spying making the rounds of the lefty blogs is the DC local police had an undercover agent attending meetings of a group dedicated to peacefully and lawfully picketing stores which sold items produced in Asian factories with wretched conditions and pay. The method was to hand deliver a letter asking the store or chain to work for better conditions for its suppliers’ workers overseas, then hold informational picketing. When the infiltrator began attending, the police would already be at the chosen locations and the picketing, even letter delivery, was stopped by the local police.
Spying, it’s what’s for the people.
Constitutions do not matter when Corporate interests are at stake.

Posted by: jawbone | Aug 8 2013 13:56 utc | 34

@b, 33: The interview in which Eli Lake says “it was not a conference call” is here. I’ve just watched it, and actually he does seem to be implying something like TOR was used, though he doesn’t specify the application it was used with (IRC, Skype, etc). Various people make fun of him on Twitter by listing all the non-telephone applications they can think of and asking “was it that?” But I think the whole thing is fiction, in any case.

Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Aug 8 2013 15:14 utc | 35

Speaking on invitations, here we have the Egyptian coup makers inviting Israel to bomb Egypt. Nasser would roll in his grave.
http://presstv.com/detail/2013/08/09/317978/israeli-strike-kills-5-in-sinai-egypt/

Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 9 2013 17:25 utc | 36