Unabomber Raises Uneasy Questions for Stanford Scholar

The Unabomber warned that technology had mutated civilization – and French Professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès thinks he’s right.

• For Apostolidès, Kaczynski has been a 15-year interest. For most of us, the Unabomber is frozen in the image that gripped America on April 3, 1996: an unkempt, bearded recluse from the Montana wilderness, a man who by all appearances could have been a backwoods yokel or a hermit-saint, arrested following a 17-year spree of deadly bombings (many targeted at universities) that had earned him the tag “Unabomber.”
• Apostolidès, who has a background as a psychologist as well as a playwright and scholar of French classical literature and drama, was not surprised by the profile of the killer – a brilliant, Harvard-educated mathematician who had been a professor at the University of California-Berkeley.
• Apostolidès had become intrigued with the Unabomber’s screed, which critiques the pervasive effect of technology on our world and humanity’s increasing dependence on it. He had already translated Kaczynski’s “audacious” manifesto for the Parisian press a few weeks before the killer’s arrest. (Kaczynski said he would halt the killings if his Industrial Society and Its Future was published; the Washington Post and the New York Times obliged in 1995.)
• Despite some sympathy for Kaczynski’s views on industrial society, Apostolidès embraces technology – “because I think there is no other way. It brings positive and negative things. They cannot be separated.
• “Our global history as animals is to go beyond our animality in order to create something we don’t know. It has been the case since the caveman,” he said.
• “There is a great leap leading God knows where,” he said.
• Inevitably, technology’s takeover has its casualties. Kaczynski created them, and became one of them – a former professor now an inmate of a maximum-security prison. Kaczynski was haunted by the notion of the noble savage, a myth that has echoed through Western thought from Rousseau to today’s blockbuster Avatar. The Unabomber, said Apostolidès, is a direct heir of the anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• However, the way back to the wilderness is a fantasy: “There’s no way we can return. No way to go back to the frontier man. Ted Kaczynski is a hundred years too late,” he said.
• In an interview, Apostolidès leaned forward across the desk in his campus office and his voice dropped: “This will shock you. He’s a very nice guy, sweet, open-minded. And I know he has blood on his hands. You cannot be all bad – even if you kill, even Hitler.”
• We would like our villains to be 100 percent evil, psychotic Snidely Whiplashes counting money in the backroom. (Look at the outcry at the portrayal of Hitler in the 2004 film Downfall.) We are uncomfortable when they look even a little bit like us, but such ambiguity is the stuff of life, said Apostolidès.
• The most obvious ambiguity may be centered within Apostolidès himself. He admits he has a longstanding interest in avant-garde ideas – but he writes about radical thoughts from the safe perch of a university professorship and his comfortable home on the Stanford campus. In short, as a part of the petite bourgeoisie Kaczynski despises.
• Kaczynski’s manifesto argues that the leftist liberals who present themselves as rebels are, in fact, obedient servants of the dominant society – a symptom of “oversocialization.” He singles out “university intellectuals” as prime examples.
• Apostolidès, who says he wouldn’t kill a fly, finds the criticism “absolutely appropriate.”
• It’s the problem of scholars, even artists: Our words have no power. We think we are changing the world – particularly on the left,” he said, and paused. “You accept your symbolic castration – that your writing will take time to have a modest influence on your contemporaries.” In other words, he accepts the compromises necessary to live a normal life, with an income, collegial support, home and family.
• Yet Kaczynski’s writings and life have intrigued Apostolidès by emphasizing “the relationship between writing and killing, ink and blood.”
• “From a cynical perspective, I write books without killing anyone – my writing will have no impact. The only way I can be listened to is to associate my writing to something.” That is, “either your own blood or someone else’s.”
• For instance, he cited Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, whose meticulously planned seppuku in 1970 triggered an avalanche of interest in his works.
• Kaczynski is following in these footsteps, rejecting the petit bourgeois alternative that Apostolidès has knowingly embraced and instead “linking blood and ink.”
• If Apostolidès’ contention seems eggheaded, consider a Jan. 8 New York Times article on the Jordanian doctor who killed nine people, including himself and seven CIA officers, in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan: “My words will die if I do not save them with my blood,” he posted pseudonymously on a blog before his death.
• “My articles will be against me if I don’t prove to them that I am not a hypocrite,” the posting read. “One has to die to make the other live. I wish I could be the one to die.”
• That said, aren’t there moral reservations in advancing Kaczynski’s writings? After all, he killed to get an audience.
• “I do not agree with his ideas, let alone his means to spread them,” Apostolidès said. Nevertheless, “The role of a scholar is to go beyond my own emotions and analyze everything.
• “It does not mean we are unaware of the ethical dimension. But we have to go beyond. It is a necessity.”

• WASHINGTON – A California man killed in a shootout with Pentagon police drove cross-country and arrived outside the military headquarters armed with two semiautomatic weapons, authorities said Friday. The shooter apparently left behind angry, anti-government Internet postings airing suspicions about the 9/11 attacks.
• John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., was named as the gunman in the Thursday evening attack. Authorities said he’d had previous run-ins with the law.
• “He came here from California,” Keevill said. “We were able to identify certain locations that he spent that last several weeks making his way from the West coast to the East coast.”
• Keevill said he did not know what motivated the shooting: “I have no idea what his intentions were.”
• On a Wikipedia page linked to Bedell, a user by the name JPatrickBedell revealed ill feelings toward the government and the armed forces.
• JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover up. Sabow’s family has maintained that he was murdered because he was about to expose covert military operations in Central America involving drug smuggling.
• That posting can be linked to Bedell through court documents matching the shooter’s birth date but Keevill said Friday that authorities had not made “a final determination” that the shooter was the same Bedell.
• The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”
• That same posting railed against the government’s enforcement of marijuana laws and included links to the author’s 2006 court case in Orange County, Calif., involving allegations of cultivating marijuana and resisting a police officer. Court records available online show the date of birth on the case mentioned by the user JPatrickBedell matches that of the John Patrick Bedell suspected in the shooting.

• WASHINGTON (AFP) – Former top US officials staged a digital doomsday simulation on Tuesday in which a huge cyberattack crashes cellphone networks, slows Web traffic to a crawl and plunges major cities into darkness.
• Dubbed “Cyber ShockWave,” the elaborate exercise was held in a Washington hotel room transformed for the day into the White House Situation Room, where the president and his advisers typically meet to address national emergencies.
• Former president George W. Bush’s Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff played the role of National Security Advisor as the “cabinet” sought to respond to a nightmare scenario drawn up by former CIA director Michael Hayden.
• As the “crisis” escalated, the officials discussed various actions including calling out the National Guard, nationalizing the utility companies and staging a retaliatory strike if the authors of the cyberattack become known.
• “If this is an attack on the United States the president, as commander in chief, has the authority to use the full powers at his disposal,” said former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, in her role as attorney general.
• “We’re in good shape from a command-and-control standpoint,” Charles Wald, a retired general acting as Secretary of Defense, reassured the team.
• “We can take action offensively if we know where to go,” said Wald, former deputy commander of US European Command. “Problematically, we don’t know where that is.”
• Three large video screens behind the participants displayed multi-color maps of the United States with a series of mock updates and a fictional television network, “GNN,” broadcast news reports on the cascading crisis.
• The simulated cyberattack was spread through a free application for smartphones about “March Madness,” the wildly popular annual US college basketball tournament.
• The “March Madness” malware contained video footage of the Red Army although a security adviser warned this may be a “red herring” and whether the attack was launched by a state, terrorists or criminals was not immediately clear.
• Launched from servers in Russia, it first crippled cellphone networks, then landlines, then the Internet and eventually the electricity grid in the entire eastern United States, exacerbated by a pair of bombings at power stations.
• New York, Philadelphia and Washington were plunged into darkness, airline traffic was disrupted and the financial markets ground to a halt.
• “This is a massive blow to the solar plexus of the economy,” said “Treasury Secretary” Stephen Friedman, former director of the National Economic Council.
• National Security Adviser Chertoff peppered the cabinet with questions.
• “If we were to shut a server down in Russia, would the Russians view that as an attack?” he asked. “If the attacker is either a state actor or a terrorist group what are our options for responding or retaliating?”
• Speaking after the scenario was over, Negroponte said it was fairly realistic. “None of it struck me as particularly outlandish,” he said.
• Former deputy CIA director John McLaughlin, who was bumped up to Director of National Intelligence for the cyber game, said Al-Qaeda would clearly “like to carry out something like this but we don’t know their capabilities.”
• “The Chinese and the Russians have the capability,” added Fran Townsend, Bush’s one-time Homeland Security advisor, who was promoted to Homeland Security secretary for the simulation.
• Wald, the Pentagon chief for a day, said: “I think the scenario we saw today is believable. I think we’re preparing for it. I don’t think we’re as prepared as we should be.”

(Read between the lines on this one…just “practicing”…)

New World Trade Center 9/11 aerial images from ABC News Released

Stunning, in the bad way.

Aafia Siddiqui

• The 37-year-old Siddiqui, who is also a mother of three, was convicted of attempted murder and assault. A New York jury found her guilty of grabbing a U.S. officer’s rifle while she was being questioned in 2008 in Afghanistan in connection with containers of chemicals and notes referring to mass-casualty attacks that she was allegedly carrying. She used the rifle to fire at FBI agents and military personnel before she was wrestled to the ground. Siddiqui sustained a gunshot wound in the struggle. No one else was injured.
• But there are still no clear answers about her whereabouts in the five years before her detention in Afghanistan. Where was Siddiqui between March 2003 and July 2008? Two of her three children still remain missing. And she has never been tried for her alleged links to Al-Qaeda — the reason for her original appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list six years ago.
• Declan Walsh, an Islamabad-based foreign correspondent for the British daily “The Guardian,” tried to resolve these mysteries last year when he traveled across Pakistan to interview officials, Siddiqui’s relatives, and anybody who would talk to try to solve the puzzle.
• Walsh tells RFE/RL that there are two aspects to Aafia Siddiqui’s story. One is the court case in New York, which was strictly focused on the events in a police station in the central Afghan city of Ghazni, where she was interrogated shortly after her arrest in July 2008.
• “But the much wider picture really is what was happening with Aafia Siddiqui for the previous five years,” he says.
• Siddiqui’s name first came to light when she disappeared in March 2003 while traveling to the airport in Karachi, according to her family. Walsh says understanding those five years is the key to unlocking her mystery.
• “There are these conflicting accounts about where she was for that period,” he says. “But the public opinion here in Pakistan is very much with the train of thought that she was in [the U.S. detention center] in Bagram [Afghanistan].
• “And I suppose that this really feeds into the kind of broader anti-Americanism in the country where Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s case has become symbolic of wider public anger about the disappearances of terror suspects, about people who go missing and who never come back again, and about perceived injustices in the American judicial system towards Muslims and particularly towards Pakistanis.”
• This popular account of Siddiqui’s fate is supported by her mother and sister and has shaped perceptions in the Pakistani media. But Walsh says that her former husband, Amjad Khan, whom she divorced in 2002, tells a different story.
• Khan told Walsh that being concerned for his children, he watched Siddiqui discreetly from a distance and that she was in Pakistan between 2003 and 2008. Walsh adds that her uncle, Shams ul-Hassan Farhuqi, also revealed a bizarre episode when Siddiqui  turned up at his house in Islamabad in January 2008 and asked him to send her to the Taliban in Afghanistan because she was “very uncomfortable” about being in the control of an intelligence agency in Pakistan. The uncle claimed Siddiqui told him that the Taliban were “the only people with whom she would feel safe.”
• Walsh says that the issue has turned into a political case and people on all sides are “looking less at the facts of the case and more at what Aafia Siddiqui represents for them.”
• He says that while her family and the Pakistani media are focused on Siddiqui’s fate, there is little discussion of her two missing children. Her elder son, Ahmed, now 13, was arrested along with her in Afghanistan. He was later returned to his aunt but has never spoken about his mother’s intervening disappearance. Her two younger children — daughter Mariam and son Sulaiman — are still missing. Siddiqui’s family, Walsh says, has remained silent about them.
• “There have been accusations and allegations that these children have been taken into orphanages or that they have died in custody,” he says. “But there has been no great examination of this side of the case. And that seems very odd to me. And I think this probably suggests why this case has many layers to it, several of which have not yet come to public light.”

• LONDON (AFP) - A man was arrested by anti-terrorism police and suspended from his job after he sent a Twitter message joking that he was going to blow up an airport, a report said Monday.
• When heavy snow at Robin Hood airport in Doncaster, northern England, threatened to ruin Paul Chambers’ plans to fly to Ireland, he vented his frustration by tapping out a message on the social networking site.
• “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote, according to The Independent newspaper. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
• A week after posting the message, Chambers was arrested under anti-terrorism laws at his office after police had apparently received a tip-off.
• The 26-year-old was questioned for seven hours by officers who failed to see the joke in his message. He has been bailed to February 11 when he will find out if he will be charged with conspiring to create a bomb hoax.
• He has also been suspended from work pending an internal investigation and banned from the airport for life.

Related: Tactics of Failure as Strategy.

Read the Secret ‘Jesus’ Messages on U.S. Military Weapons

(yeah, and tell us again that this is NOT a religious war…)

• In August of 2005 Trijicon was awarded a $660 million dollar, multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 of its Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight (ACOG) to the U.S. Marine Corps. According to Trijicon, the ACOG is “designed to function in bright light, low light or no light conditions,” and is “ideal for combat due to its high degree of discrimination, even among multiple moving targets.” At the end of the scope’s model number, you can read “JN8:12”, which is a reference to the New Testament book of John, Chapter 8, Verse 12, which reads: “Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” (King James Version) (ABC News)

Barcepundit - Spanish Communist Leader used for both Bin Laden and Al_Qaeda Terrorist

• NOW THAT’S what I call a fixation: the FBI used the hair and forehead of Gaspar Llamazares, a leader of Spain’s communist party, for the composite of Osama bin Laden (after the brouhaha it has been withdrawn from the Rewards for Justice page). They also used it (link in Spanish) for Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a Libyan citizen and al-Qaeda terrorist (link in Spanish):
• UPDATE. There’s now coverage by the AP, Reuters and the UK’s Daily Telegraph, but only regarding the Osama bin Laden picture, at least for now.

Also after the FBI said that the original computer sketch didn’t give them the look they wanted, here’s the story behind their random choice of a face:

• “Ken Hoffman, a spokesman the FBI, admitted that a technician “was not satisfied” with the hair features offered by the FBI’s software programme and instead used part of a photo of Mr Llamazares, found on the internet. “The technican had no idea whose image he had found and no dark motive for using it,” he said.

Yep, there has never been any history of dark motives from US Intelligence…yesh.

“An event occurs and our global communications system amplifies it into a cacophony.  Let’s take two recent examples:

• An attempted airplane bomber (Newark).
• The assassination of a couple of CIA operatives in Afghanistan.

In both cases, relatively small events (in that neither threatened us, nor the organizations in question in any existential way) were amplified (in hours) to a level where the entire US government was put into a tailspin.  Organizational purges and strategy rethinks were launched.  Systemic failures were hinted at.  Etc.

In short, the entire US government became a hostage to the global information network twice in the same week.

What can be done?  The first thing that should be done when something like this occurs is to take a deep breath.  Put the incident in perspective and communicate the same.  It’s not a real crisis.

De-escalation should be the first response in anything but an acute existential emergency.

The second step?  I’ll leave that up to you guys.”

(via Global Guerrillas)

hereblog:

Rudy Giuliani has now claimed on Good Morning America (yay for YouTube): “We had no domestic [‘terror’] attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama [re: failed underwear bomber].”

Not only was Giuliani the mayor of NYC during the Bush Administration at the time of the 9/11 attacks, he also capitalized on it to raise his national profile and run for president in 2008, a campaign during which he earned the nickname Mr. Noun-Verb-9/11. (That’s all he talked about.) Moreover, there were four attacks on 9/11 alone: American Airlines Flights 11 and 77, and United Airlines Flights 93 and 175. Moreover, there were mailed anthrax attacks that same month. Moreover, there was the infamous failed shoe bombing attack that took place in American airspace on a flight to Miami in December 2001. As for Giuliani’s personal credibility, NYC’s multi-million dollar command center was destroyed on 9/11 because he personally made the decision, against expert recommendation, to build it in the World Trade Center — even though it was widely understood to be the likeliest target in the event of an attack. Why? So he and his mistress would have a convenient rendezvous point near Giuliani’s office in City Hall.

Back to Bush, that’s 6 domestic attacks that we know about within the first year of Bush’s administration, which then exploited those events to usurp hundreds of billions in public money to wage two failed wars (the larger one being blatantly unjustified, inflammatory, and illegal). Giuliani was right there with them, the consummate cheerleader.

Giuliani’s statement can only be rationally viewed as one element of a concerted right-wing effort to revise history in their favor. As poor as establishment liberals may be at taking advantage of their power, we would be absolute fools to put the foxes back in the henhouse.

Visualizing the Underwear Bomber’s Online Life

• The Obama administration is due to release a declassified intelligence report today on Detroit terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a.k.a. the Underwear Bomber. Courtesy of the invaluable Computational Legal Studies Blog, we can take a closer look at Abdulmutallab’s online life — and possibly, his increasing radicalization.
• Under the online handle “Farouk1986,” Abdulmutallab was a regular on the Islamic forum Gawaher.com, where he appears to have posted 310 times between 2005 and 2007. Thanks to the Evan Kohlmann of the NEFA Foundation, we now have all of Farouk1986’s posts, assembled into a single file. The CLS Blog took this one step further, generating a basic visualization and analysis of the structure of Farouk1986’s online communication network as it evolved over time.
• To do that, the CLS Blog expanded on the NEFA dataset to map out Farouk1986’s secondary and indirect communications and generate deeper context. “In order to obtain a better understanding of this communication network, we retrieved every ‘topic’ in which Farouk1986 participated at least once,” the authors write. “Each ‘topic’ is comprised of one or more ‘posts’ from one or more users. Each ‘post’ may be in response to another user’s ‘post.’ The NEFA data contains only posts made by Farouk1986 – our data contains the entire context within which his posts existed.”
• So what does this add to the understanding of the man who attempted to take down Northwest Airlines flight 253? For starters, Farouk1986 appeared to have joined an existing online network that moved his life in a more religious direction. Once he joined that network, his online interactions became more stable. Put otherwise, it may reflect the tendency of online behavior to become a “feedback loop.” Instead of expanding his apparent network of contacts, it became more exclusive and self-reinforcing.

(SO this is how the NSA does it for all bloggers of note…hmmm…A practical understanding of John Boyd’s OODA loop definitely in effect here.)