The US military, through a West Point terrorism training school, released documents seized during the Osama bin Laden raid, a year ago this week. Readers know that despite the formidable achievement, for which the President deserves great credit, there has been no bin Laden dividend. The 99 percent has seen no benefit from his killing. The war, if anything, has accelerated with more drone assassinations and special operations work.
The original No-Prize was invented by Stan Lee of Marvel Comics. It was a way to say 'atta-boy,' a symbolic air prize totally without worth. And that's the bin Laden doc release by the US government.
At the time of the raid the media, fed by government minders, dutifully reported that a "trove" of materials had been seized in the bin Laden compound.
Physically, perhaps it was true. However, the release of 17 declassified documents, constituting over 170 pages of translated-into-English letters, is a dud.
They are not particularly interesting. For example, in document "SOCOM-2012-0000004T" there is much trivial discussion on which media outlets in the US should get al Qaeda's propaganda messages for the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Fox News is written off.
"[CNN] seems to be in cooperation with the government more than the others (with the exception of Fox News)," the letter reads, penned by American-turned al Qaeda man Adam Gadahn to bin Laden. The Arabic version of CNN, he writes, is somewhat better.
In the end Gadahn makes the recommendation that every news channel receive a copy of Ayman Zawahiri's 9/11 anniversary speech.
"Except for Fox News, let her die in her anger." Inadvertently funny, that.
Gadahn also recommends a few journalists by name -- all them of seemingly cocked up in some interesting way.
There is "Brian Russ" -- he means ABC's Brian Ross. And "Simon Hirsh," presumably Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh.
Finally, also on the list is "Jerry Van Dyke."
I leave only a picture for readers to determine why this is hilarious.
Were bin Laden and Adam Gadahn fans of re-runs of My Mother the Car? It is hard to know.
The other observation to be made is that being the preferred journalists of al Qaeda is like getting a recommendation from a colony of flesh-eating bacteria.
The remote possibility exists that some of the material has been doctored by the US government for the express purpose of humiliation.
Readers can zip out to Cryptome here, to see for themselves. But it's mostly rancid old mutton, passed off as veal for a day or two in the mainstream media.
It shows again how short al Qaeda was on talent. It just adds to the picture that over a decade of war history had passed bin Laden and his terror men by.
Last year the picture was of bin Laden, alone in his compound, writing letters to his few minions, missives ignored. Much like Hitler in the Fuhrer bunker near the end, moving formations that no longer existed on a room's map table, no one daring to point out the obvious.
There are big differences, of course. In the grand scheme of history, Hitler still makes bin Laden look like a piker.
In sharp contrast, many Americans still know some of the famous names of US generals from WWII. Movies were made about them.
Nobody down ladder knows the names of the men who killed bin Laden. They may know the name of the dog on the mission -- Cairo -- because it was convenient publicity.
Americans can't name the commanding generals in any of the theaters of war where there is action against al Qaeda or the Taliban. And they will never be able to do so because no one cares.
Glorious memorable movies will not be made. The war will go on, somewhere, always.
This is the way the military machine has made things. If there are any men or women of stature among them aghast at the length of the conflict and how millions upon millions of their countrymen have been economically disenfranchised and cast into ruin on the home front while they have continued to meaninglessly fight on, we will never hear it.
Instead, every week or so you get to read something like this:
The nation's top military officer told Harvard's Kennedy School Thursday that despite the death of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the exit of longtime dictators from the world stage, and no mortal enemy in the form of a nation-state the United States is more vulnerable.
Army General Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told students at a forum on the Cambridge campus that even though the world appears to enjoy greater stability and interdependence, threats looming beneath the surface -- from cyber warfare to the proliferation of long-range missiles -- actually place American security at greater risk.
"The truth is, I believe I am chairman at a time that seems less dangerous but is actually more dangerous," Dempsey said, according to a copy of his prepared remarks ...
A week from now no readers will remember this man's name, only that yet another bit of exaggerated insane trash was passed off as wisdom from an expert.
We do not need or train good military leaders. They are only needed to ensure the machine continues to grind.
al Qaeda Epic Fail
Inspire magazine, while not meant to be an al Qaeda joke, has always been easy to brush off. It's been an example of how al Qaeda has had a serious problem with recruitment filled as it is with wishful thinkers and fantasies on terror that will never come true. Al Qaeda, for practical purposes, is operationally dead. As far as the 99 percent and middle class America is concerned, it poses no serious threat.
Al Qaeda has been whittled down by American might over a decade of war. The US employs more money and manpower hunting it than it needs to destroy a handful of medium-sized nations.
Al Qaeda, while not gone, just does not matter. Jihadists may got lucky now and then in the future. But there won't be any game changers with regards to the progeny of Osama bin Laden. The history book has closed on this chapter although the US war machine will continue to prosecute it.
Yesterday then, news of the latest issues of Inspire -- inspiring only laughter if you have any sense.
The men who launched al Qaeda's English-language magazine may have died in a U.S. missile strike last fall, but "Inspire" magazine lives on without them -- and continues to promote jihadi attacks on Western targets, offering detailed advice on how to start huge forest fires in America with timed explosives and how to build remote-controlled bombs ...
But issue nine carries equally lethal advice, with "It Is of Your Freedom to Ignite a Firebomb," which gives detailed instructions on how to ignite an "ember bomb" in a U.S. forest, recommending Montana because of the rapid population growth in wooded areas.
"In America, there are more houses built in the [countryside] than in the cities," says the writer, who uses the pseudonym The AQ Chef. "It is difficult to choose a better place [than] in the valleys of Montana."
Readers know US terror beat reporters are panderers. And stupid.
Under their profiessional model they choose not to point out the obvious cluelessness of the al Qaeda man.
More houses are built in the urban environment than in the woods. That's a fact.
I live in southern California. In Pasadena. Where I can look outside and see the mountains, and the houses built right up to them and on their lower slopes. Every year southern California has fires, some of them set by arsonists. These fires burn down homes, frequently lots and lots of them.
Population of Montana: 998,199
Population of LA County: 9,830,420
Oof!
The al Qaeda men writing for Inspire have obviously never actually been to the United States.
They just wishfully think it would be good, and really terrorizing, if someone could like, uh, start a couple fires in ... wait for it ... Montana!
Where they'd be put out right away. Al Qaeda apparently cannot even scan net news archives for stories where fires do get out of control in states where lots of people live -- like here, or ... well. Do it yourself.
Inspire only shows two things -- that al Qaeda is virtually destroyed and that US war-on-terror reporters are crap. The latter has been known for a long time.
The ABC news story, and others, note the new issues of Inspire are "riddled" with typos.
One of al Qaeda's most prominent radical clerics may have been killed in a drone strike last year, but his words appear to have lived on in a new issue of al Qaeda's English-language magazine in which he calls for biological attacks against the U.S.
"The use of chemical and biological weapons against population centers is allowed and is strongly recommended," U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki is quoted as saying in one of two new issues of the Inspire magazine.
Al Qaeda has never had any bioweapons capability. It is a fiction although the terror agency's desire to have them is not.
What's left of it, a small number of kooks and feebs worldwide, apparently continues to call for the wishful manufacture of biological weapons because its people, who are not very discerning, read everything about it in western news. And they have come to believe that because so many stories assert that it its elementary to produce biological weapons, someday it will be easy for them. Or it will fall into someone's hands, magically, or something like that.
Reality, on the other hand, has not been kind to the group in this matter.
Everything wished for in Inspire has never happened. The only interesting issue was the one which covered, after the fact, the al Qaeda plan to bomb UPS and FedEx jets with bombs hidden in toner cartridges.
That plan didn't work, either. In fact, I made a short song about it which is now the most viewed DD video on YouTube because it comes up when anyone searches for the UPS "logistics song," now famous through commercials.
It included screen shots from old Inspires.
It was done for the LULZ.
However, my favorite Inspire plan was the one suggesting running over people with a Ford F-150 pick-up truck with a snow shovel attached to the front bumper.
On Inspire and al Qaeda -- from the archives.
The fun and informative musical video interlude: "Jesus of America says, 'Guns, not butter! The rest is going all for naught."
Originally published on Dick Destiny blog.
