Second Chance

Category: conspiracy theory

  • benazir bhutto

    let’s get this straight:
    – benazir bhutto was shot.
    – subsequently a bomb goes off nearby, apparently killing the gunman.
    – an autopsy is not done, the coroner’s reports are confiscated by secret police, the coroner is ordered not to speak to reporters.
    – forensic analysis is not done before the site is hosed down by gov’t officials.
    – musharraf claims the following day that bhutto was killed by the bomb blast and blames islamic militants.
    – a month later musharraf appears on 60 minutes and blames bhutto for her own death.
    – now we read that the isi has “lost control” of their surrogate paramilitary/whatevers….
    does that scan?
    or could it be this?
    “(Benazir Bhutto) said two things that sealed her fate. She said that if elected PM, she would allow US forces to hunt for bin Laden on Pakistani soil, and that she would allow the Vienna-based IAEA to interrogate the rogue nuclear scientist, AQ Khan about his nuclear smugglings to North Korea, Iran, Libya, etc. After those statements, she had no chance of surviving.” Richard Sale of UPI
    see sic semper tyrannis

  • if you can't trust even one CA in your root trust list, you can't trust anybody

    today’s fun fact:
    VeriSign runs the domain name system for the .com and the .net domains.
    VeriSign also sells about half of the net’s SSL certificates…
    VeriSign can issue a certificate for any one of their customers.
    It is claimed that a certificate that is signed by a trusted certificate authority (CA) can protect against the man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack and also domain name spoofing.
    So if Alice is protected by a VeriSign cert, it is an easy technical matter for VeriSign to issue a new cert [and also spoof a .com or .net domain] that allows them to MITM the naive and trusting Alice.
    [in other words, if you can’t trust the CA, you can’t trust anybody. now for the fun part…]
    Due to a bug in the PKI (the public key infrastructure based on x.509 keys that manages keys for SSL), all CAs are equally trusted.
    That is, for most internet browsers, there is no firewall between one certificate authority and another, so if you trust VeriSign (and almost all browsers do) they can issue a cert to MITM any other CA-issued cert, and every browser will accept it without saying boo.
    in other words, if there’s even one CA in your root list that you can’t trust, then you can’t trust anybody!
    [and for the coup de gras, …]
    VeriSign provides a managed service to telcos and internet service providers in order to help them handle wiretaps, eavesdropping, and other compliance tasks.
    [now, if you are familiar with the bill that mandates intelligence and law enforcement agency access to telcos and internet providers, and consider their relationship with VeriSign and possible use of this service, you will quickly be forced to conclude that the supposed security of ssl encryption based on pki is a total myth.]

  • The truth sometimes hurts

    The truth sometimes hurts.
    Even though G.W is one of our own, despite the fact he was born in Connecticut, and he’s the grandson of a senator from Connectictut, the great-grandson it turns out of two different wealthy bankers from New York and Connecticut, and he’s spent summers at his daddy’s summer house in Maine since he was knee high to a bean pole, as he might be inclined to say, despite his patrician roots. One time partying at daddy’s summer place, he was busted for DWI. But the record was somehow magically erased, like a year or two of his supposed national guard service, … he’s just a good ‘ol country boy who cheated his way through Yale and Harvard. What you see is what you get.
    But the truth is we have two and (discounting extreme conspiracy theories) only two theories of what happened on 9/11. We call them the “incompetence theory” and the “operation ignore” theory.
    The “incompetence theory” is that espoused by the supposed liberal media such as NPR and David Corn of The Nation, but also by others, including folks like Richard Clarke, the NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator at the time, who apparently was running the situation room on 9/11 while Bush was somewhere over Nebraska, the rest of the White House had been evacuated and Cheney and Rice were in some bunker somewhere. But the incompetence theory is also espoused by respected analysts such as none other than Austin’s own Stratfor.com.
    The incompetence theory holds that there undoubtedly were pockets of knowledge, which put together in retrospect, seem to indicate that various agencies of the government (as well as proxies such as British and Israeli intelligence operating within the US with our government’s knowledge and consent) had information which, in context, indicated a major operation against “symbols of American power” was being planned, but that these various pieces of the puzzle were not connected due to “institutional compartmentalization.”
    There are a number of specific problems with the incompetence theory as put forth, but it would be premature to presume in the absence of facts that an intelligence failure of this magnitude was due solely to “institutional compartmentalization.”
    Unfortunately, the facts may very well never be known, especially if they put the current administration in an unfavorable light.
    While, as a general rule, it is unwise to attribute to active conspiracy what can be explained by simple greed or incompetence, neither assumption is a substitute for the facts. We, the American people, are assumed to acquiesce to the notion that we can never know the facts in any useful detail due to “national security concerns.”
    Putting aside the obvious objection that the event has already occurred — we have already been attacked — we are told that we should not pry too deeply into the why and wherefore of what was and is known about the attacks and the attackers. “Just trust us” we are told, by the very folks who claim their own incompetence led to this tragedy.
    On the other hand, the “Operation Ignore” theory put forth by folks like former Treasury Secretary O’Neill, Former CIA Director Tenet, who both served directly under President Bush, as well as some other well-informed individuals who presuppose that these compartmentalized facts may in fact have been synthesized into analysis, and that analysis had in fact been presented to the people responsible for policy formulation, but was intentionally ignored, because it jarred with preconceived notions of who America’s most dangerous enemies were.
    So, our candidate must choose: either he’s a bumbling incompetent, or he’s a moron being manipulated by a small group of neo-conservatives toward ends only dimly perceived, and certainly unexamined.
    Neither would seem to be a commendation for reelection.

  • cahoots

    ok, I don’t know why, but these oddball memories have been coming to me.
    I remember the day I bought the band’s album cahoots up at hempstead mall. john brought me up there, he could drive.
    at that time, he wasn’t much older than monica is now, and I wasn’t much older than lizzie.
    we were already pretty much out there. everyone seemed to be, but I now realize it was something that was happening on the east coast and west coast, in the urban and suburban areas pretty much. something else was happening in various places, but not the kind of complete cultural upheaval we were amidst.
    and when you’re growing up, first of all, you’re not ready for any of this stuff you don’t know what’s going on, even when things are pretty stable. but growing up in that time in that place, was nuts.
    i’ve now known people who grew up poor, or rural, or both;
    people who grew up on farms in kashmir, and in revolutionary housing blocks in shanghai under the maoists.
    ok?
    these folks have had it much harder than, praise God, I hope I ever have to know. that’s not what I’m talking about.
    what I’m talking about is that we were completely at sea. if you’re poor, and growing up on a farm, its a pretty much known quantity. ok, we know where we are, and where we’re going, and maybe it sucks. but its known.
    what we were dealing with was a rocking sea. it was more similar, I think to the turn of the twentieth century in europe, from what I understand, the fall of the ancient regime, and everything was different. all the pillars of society had essentially fallen. you found the results everywhere: in modern art, in modern music, in modern architecture, all of which seem quaint and dated now.
    and the sixties and seventies seem like that somewhat now, except for the parts that endured, which we take for granted. equal rights, or at least the lip service and in reality something more nearly approaching equal opportunities for blacks and women, tolerance for differences in appearance, hair, dress, and lifestile, at least on a social level, the new music, and artistic milieu: irreverence in film, television, books. the antiwar movement, the ecology movement, the conspiracy theories, the drug culture. and later, the reactionaries, who are after all not entirely wrong. and ultimately its all about the dollars, and whatever it was you thought you were thinking just got coopted by the machine, like when you hear the who playing background to ads for hummer on tv, or the stones at the super bowl, or stockbrokers wearing expensive jerry garcia ties, its all kind of sick and disorienting. and putting aside how derivative all that rock music was, there was an element of uniqueness beyond what muddy waters or lighting hopkins ever did or said, its like this big echo chamber. they were responding to english folk and church music in the american south, and adding in african and other kinds of beats and whatever, and before there’s sunday morning, oh, there’s saturday night, and all that.
    but what didn’t pass away, we now take as accepted norms. and its easy to forget what a challenge it was to bring out something that was new.