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Mail Fakes Nairobi Pictures
The British Daily Mail, in a now deleted piece, promoted what it called exclusive CCTV pictures of the Nairobi mall attack.
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London Times Africa correspondent Jerome Starkey points out that the picture in the middle is from an April 16 2010 FBI Miami release of photographs of a bank robbery (see pic 4). The picture on the left is from a Reuters distributed video of a raid on a hospital in Columbia released on September 19 2013. The provenance of the other two pictures are yet unknown.
The FBI picture from 2010 is also used in this Mail Online piece, still online, where it is attributed and copyrighted to Keith Waldegrave, a Mail on Sunday photographer.
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The caption reads:
Terror at the mall: A gunman takes aim at the hostages as they lie face down inside a bank at the Westgate shopping centre during the terrorist attack
How can a CCTV picture from a public FBI release be copyrighted to a Mail photographer?
Well, I followed the line back from Global Research to Simon Tisdall in the Guardian (as usual GR didn’t bother to give a link), and from there back to here:
Is Al-Shabab Disintegrating?
Richard Mugisha, AllAfrica.com, Sep 8 2013
On Jun 26 the world woke to the news that the leader of the group, Ahmed Abdi Godane, ordered the execution of his four top commanders including two of the co-founders al-Alfghani and Burhan. Other top leaders fled for their dear lives and sixteen others were put under arrest in Barowe, one of al-Shabab’s remaining strongholds, 250 km south of Mogadishu. Godane, the emir of al-Shabab, also known as Mukhtar Abu Zubayr, accused his longtime colleagues of insubordination and standing against the unity of the movement. Abd’ul-Aziz Abu Musab, al-Shabab spokesman, told the media that these leaders disobeyed the orders and tried to divide the group by issuing statements contrary to the Shabab position endangering the cohesion of the movement. Musab said: “There came out some of Mujahedin individuals and leaders who stood up to disintegrate the Mujahedin, who are against the unity of the Mujahedin. They were noticed and told that the unity of the Muslims is Allah’s order. We have informed their widows of their deaths, as they must now wear the clothes of mourning.” The senior leaders of the group, including those killed, accused Godane of a brutal and un-Islamic style of leadership. Al-Afghani is quoted as having said before he was executed: “Godane has grown tyrannical and close-minded and strayed from the true path of Jihad.”
So there you have it. This Godane only took over, via a coup & murder spree, just over 3 months ago. It gets better:
According to media reports, the wrangle in the top leadership of the al-Shabab reached irreconcilable level when in Apr 2013, a letter criticizing Godane for his leadership style was circulated on extremist websites reportedly authoured by al-Afghani to Ayman al-Zawahiri. In the letter, Al-Afghani claimed to be speaking on behalf of what he called “the silent majority” of members, decried the deterioration of al-Shabab as a power to contend with in the war in Somalia. He attributed this state of affairs to the personal conduct and dictatorial leadership of Godane. In the letter, Al-Afghani also lamented that al-Shabab had lost ground, as well as the sympathies and support of the local population because of the militant leadership’s arrogance and draconian methods.
And as if that wasn’t enough to establish the exact pattern of a pseudo-gang leader in the Kitson (Robert Thomson, Gerald Templar, whoever) mould, finally let me offer this:
Godane, aged 36, claimed to have ordered and perpetuated the Jul 11 2010 bombings in Kampala that killed 74 people. He is one of the most radical supporters of global Jihad. Godane is one of the most wanted terrorists in the world, with a $7m reward for his arrest. In 2011, he issued a Jihadi video titled “At your service, Osama”. In it, he urged all Somalis to follow the AQ leader, and vowed: “The wars will not end until Sharia is implemented in all continents in the world.”
You remember what I said on Sep 26:
For quite a few years now I have had a simple model of this. It applies equally well to Somalia, Yemen and Mali, just to give a few parallels. First, you have a genuine, indigenous revolt. Then you have the mysterious appearance of an AQ-affiliate right alongside it, and even intermittently allying with it. This AQ-affiliate is what the originator of this whole system of counter-insurgency, Brigadier Frank Kitson of Kenya and Malaya fame, called a “pseudo-gang”. But the genuine indigenous rebels don’t realise this, unfortunately. They think al-Qaeda is the greatest thing in anti-imperialism since sliced bread. They shiver with delight whenever they remember 9/11, because they take it at face value. They admire AQ, and they think Zawahiri is genuine too. So the ‘alliance’ is something they accept with a real sense of being honoured. But then things start to go wrong. The AQ-affiliated “ally” starts doing things that make no sense, but have the effect of bringing down massive retaliation from the central government. If our poor rebels had read some basic textbooks on guerrilla warfare, they would know as a matter of doctrine that you don’t for instance, bomb prestigious restaurants in the capital city when there are only a few hundred of you, your grievance is essentially regional or ethnic, and you have not yet developed any support among the vast masses of the peasantry. But now it’s too late. As the distinguished theoretician Vo Nguyen Giap would have put it, ya fucked.
Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Oct 4 2013 19:02 utc | 63
When posing as a Marxist one should know the fundamentals. Posted by: somebody | Oct 5, 2013 1:06:40 PM | 80
You do seem to have a gift for offensiveness. I suppose we all have, and it comes out the moment we get annoyed or even excited. A gift for offensiveness. What a charming species acquisition. Talking of which, here is the simplest possible answer to your ‘argument’, after which I shall not return to this exchange again because I’m sure it bores everybody else stiff, like all the verbal ping-pong tournaments that keep developing here.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please
From this, in your comment #70, “History is the outcome of the actions of something like 7 billion people,” and in your #75, you simplify your view to “history is made by the people.” neither of these statements has anything to do with the point Marx is making. I shall summarise the plot:
Why did the Paris proletariat not rise in revolt after Dec 2? On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpen proletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of Dec 10. Bonaparte sought his model not in the annals of world history but in the annals of the Society of Dec 10, in the annals of the criminal courts. He robs the Bank of France of twenty-five million francs, buys General Magnan with a million, the soldiers with fifteen francs apiece and liquor, comes together with his accomplices secretly like a thief in the night, has the houses of the most dangerous parliamentary leaders broken into, and Cavaignac, Lamoricière, Le Flô, Changarnier, Charras, Thiers, Baze, etc., dragged from their beds and put in prison, the chief squares of Paris and the parliamentary building occupied by troops, and cheapjack placards posted early in the morning on all the walls, proclaiming the dissolution of the National Assembly and the Council of State, the restoration of universal suffrage, and the placing of the Seine Department in a state of siege. In like manner he inserted a little later in the Moniteur a false document which asserted that influential parliamentarians had grouped themselves around him and formed a state consulta. The rump parliament, assembled in the mairie building of the Tenth Arrondissement and consisting mainly of Legitimists and Orleanists, votes the deposition of Bonaparte amid repeated cries of “Long live the Republic,” unfailingly harangues the gaping crowds before the building, and is finally led off in the custody of African sharpshooters, first to the d’Orsay barracks, and later packed into prison vans and transported to the prisons of Mazas, Ham, and Vincennes. Thus ended the party of Order, the Legislative Assembly, and the February Revolution. By a coup de main the night of Dec 1-2, Bonaparte had robbed the Paris proletariat of its leaders, the barricade commanders. An army without officers, it left to its vanguard, the secret societies, the task of saving the insurrectionary honor of Paris.
So much for “There is no way a Marxist can be a conspiracy theorist.”
Posted by: Rowan Berkeley | Oct 5 2013 18:21 utc | 81
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