Or is it Wolfowitz crying, "Boy, what have we neocons done?"

Where are these reports coming from? I think this is a serious question. Who is leaking these "talking points" and all their implications, so that they are erupting like mushrooms after the rain.

Yes, I know it sounds paranoid Tom Clancy style, but as Theresa Nielsen Hayden says, "I deeply resent the way this adminstration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist," and at this point givven all the chatter about COOP, the fact that these same people were involvd in Iran Contra and the FIMA thing to supsend the constitution in case of disaster, I think theyr'e all rubbing their hands in gleeful administration of Congress being vaporized and them getting to declare martial law from their bunkers.

bellatrys echoes my own sentiments. Until the last few months, I always dismissed the wilder notions of conspiracy theories. I remember reading the reports on the Tri-lateral Commission more than twenty years ago and thinking it was just a bit far-fetched. Now I find myself seeing conspiracies in a lot of places. The mail is terrible in Iraq and absentee ballots may not arrive in time for the election in November? They're trying to keep 138,000 votes for Kerry from being cast. Sound far-fetched? It woul dhave to me four years ago, but then I know about the purging of the voter rolls in Florida and THEY ARE DOING IT AGAIN.

But I think there is a real threat from terrorists this summer. After all, President Dumbass and Vice-President Pacemaker have managed to beef up the terrorist members list by many thousands with their incompetence. Now we all pay the price.

I don't know whether to get nervous(er) or not... so far, all of the "heightened alerts" have resulted in diddly, plus or minus about nothin', while the real bad shit has all happened without the "chatter." I think I'd get worried if the scary talk stopped happening, because then I'd suspect that there was another something bad on its way.

Or... are they about to double-fake us???

okay dean, I am going to tell you guys something that I haven't said in public before in Blogistan - I *found* that "chatter" they were talking about last year, stumbled on it, it was on Usenet, there were several strings of it going back to a little before 9/11 and with FLA (!) isps.

They were very scary even given they were some kind of code - "goldsmiths" & "markets" and "jugs of oil," being talked about, to me and a friend it sounded like bombs and assasination attemps. Remeber all the Karzai attempts? and in Pakistan? We figured it was a simple substituion that was no good unless you had the keys from one on one. (I have done such codes in school to pass notes, for example, when I was much younger.)

It was classic "cuckoo's egg" stuff, plain view, Karla style out of John LeCarre - or that RL guy who left messages in the big church in London.

If you're doubtful/curious I will find all the data off backup. I saved it all & called the FBI. They didn't want to hear from me. I tried the CIA. ditto.

Now either they already knew or they didn't take me seriously. I couldn't tell.

Via personal connections, I *finally* got NCIS (USS Cole investagion) to take it on. They took it serously, at least someone there did, and took all my data and my rudimentary 'search algorithms' (I don't know diddly about crypt) and I don't know if it helped or not but at least someone real was on it.

Then the news in the mass media came out about "chatter" and how watch out for "banks" or maybe "supermarkets" being hit. That was what the FBI were getting from "goldsmith" and "market." (!!!#$%@??!)

So I knew that the FBI already knew about my finds - but that didn't reassure me, becaue obviously they didn't have a clue as to how to translate the code.

So I have not had any confidence at all in our security's ability to fight terror. (there was something else, too, analysis wise, I will tell you about it another time.)

If anyone wants detals, feel free to email me, but I don't want to talk about it a lot in public.

The funny thing about the Bush Junta is that every time someone comes up with something that sounds a little "out there" it eventually becomes a documentable fact or the subject of a government investigation due to the weight of the evidence, no matter how circumstantial that evidence might be. Don't let anyone make you feel sheepish for voicing your opinions.

how about a drink-off between the drunken cheerleader and osama? say, sacramental wine at 10 paces?

SMD, thx. I don't want to get into the details because it would mean more of my personal history than I want to disclose, not just because I'm paranoid but partly that, I excpet my identity to get blown eventually but trying to postpone. The "you're crazy, you read too much of that spy stuff" thing I went through (and got over) when I first stumbled across it almost two years ago. There's another set of similar code using computer terminology, sounds like ordinary tech conversation, I can't remember what the keywords were just now, but it was harder to find because more legit traffic talks about disks and drives and so on, but some of the proper names were the same.

They're still at it, btw, in the same manner. (I gave up checking after NCIS took over; I couldn't do anything and it was too frustrating.) They've moved to - they had started to, and are now doing it pretty much exclusively it looks like - the alt.sex newsgroups, which is just wierd, but has a certain logic to it. Where is an unlikely place for puritans to be hanging out, on the surface? (Of course we who know our own religions' puritans would expcet it...)

But go to google:groups, and search goldsmith market and see what you get. And then see if you think I was right to flip out about it, if you don't think ths corresponds to the "chatter" they were talking about that eventually was revealed nonspecifically to be internet related. The earliest strands of this, like I said, I found buried in the "alt.test" groups, and they started in Aug 2001, and several of the posters were from Roadrunner in Florida. There were also a lot of ISPs that I traced to European servers, mostly France, and most I couldnt trace at all.

--There was also a guy about a year ago, an officer iirc from the War College, who said thy were doing internet traffic flagrantly on purpose, to provoke the CIA/FBI to react by making statements/alerts etc, and using it as experiments. I assumed he meant this.

Oh.

Gonna google the newsgroups right now. Very freaky. When I used to hang out in the newsgroups, I just argued about abortion rights with religious nutcases. I've always been amazed that the newsgroups have survived the internet. I can still get good computer support in the newsgroups for various items of software and software trends. This one.

Freaky.

I'm back. That is freaky. It also seems like it would be an awfully easy code to crack. I worked for a security software company that dealt in, among other things, encryption. I never met the NSA spooks myself, but our CTO did and he told me that the guys in the NSA encryption org are the best he ever met. They find the mistakes and flaws that the top guys in private industry don't find. By the way, the NSA is the place to take this, not CIA, FBI, or whoever. Those are the real spooks. Most people don't know that the NSA has more personnel and budget than CIA. I would be very surprised if they weren't on this.

I did a brief look. I found messages in the vein that you were describing as follows:
5/24/04-8 msg
5/22/04-4 msg
5/18/04-9 msg
5/16/04-4 msg
5/15/04-2 msg
5/14/04-9 msg

That's as far as I looked. For a certain personality type, it is almost irresistible once you see it. You have to ponder it and try to figure it out, find the patterns. It certainly looks like it could be the "chatter" they are talking about, but it's not in my skill set to figure out what it is. Leave it to the spooks.

Also, do as I intend to do now. Leave it alone. You did your duty and passed it on to the ones who need to know. I wouldn't poke that sack again. Never know what might hop out.

The whole notion in atrios was that the fact that saddam avoided 34 assassination attempts suggested he had inside help (chalabi was doing double take until he had upper hand?.

Then apply that to Bin laden. Who has survived numerous attempts, that usually needed congress OK when the Clenis had the Newts all over him.

SO they KNOW something will happen, and then tell the whole world that chatter is up. To basically convince AQ to change methods and help them avoid detection. They know their gig's up and otherwise this may help it succeed because if nothing else happens aWol's ass is done...

At this point, I think even the GOP and the French know that Shrub is cooked. The only thing that can save him now is actually Diebold. He will not win election (I do not refer to this as re-election since he never won the first one) without something illegal done at the ballot boxes (metaphorical ballot boxes, of course). An article on Daily Kos today claims that television advertising for both parties has been a dreadfully ineffective tool, so a blitz of ads doesn't look like it will move the voters. Everyone is well aware that undecideds, of which there are not many at this point, tend to break for the challenger, and the challenger is either leading or in a dead heat in all polls.

The cheating has already begun. They're purging the voter rolls again in Florida and there is unrest among the troops in Iraq because mail delivery (138,000 absentee ballots, ladies and gentlemen) has been exceptionally poor.

IF anything happens the responsibility will lay directly at Rumsfeld's feet. We could have "put paid" to the Osama account at Tora Bora if we had closed the passes South with Rangers with radios and AC-130s on-call instead of hiring warlords to act as toll booths.
He screwed the pooch when China stole our spy plane, he screwed it again on 9/11, again at Tora Bora and gang-banged it in Iraq. Why does this guy still have a job and a passport??

Some Answers

"Ashcroft cites al-Qaida plan, but how credible is the information?"

Now, two things. This is scarier than our enemies being lethal - that our protectors are completely incompetent.

Second thing - if some guy with a fax machine can send the FBI into a tizzy - why can't we? I am *sorely* tempted to go down to some Kinkos or cafe and play terr'ist by writing up threatening notes from a fictional "AQ splinter group" claiming responisbility for the cicada invasion and hey, in Britain, how about hoof-and-mouth disease? and mad cow? Then reveal that it was so easy to fool the mighty US intelligence and justice system, because they so want to be fooled in a certain direction.

(Mr. Murder knows why I want to do this so bad *g*)

But it would be like the people who test the airline security and reveal the holes - a valuable service to the nation.

That Guy Scares Me

As before via Eschaton comments

Ashcroft couldn't get his shit straight with a ruler, and Bush is poor excuse for a ruler already.

Tom Ridge was all over him. DHOS didn't notify the largets cities, any states or law enforcement agencies.

Obvious chain pull at the highest level.
Our luck it was a chance AQ was undergoing something and being watched and now will change their method thanks to Johnny Wad and his terra alert...

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