Steven Gaal Posted March 16, 2013 Author Share Posted March 16, 2013 NATIONAL OUTLET ?? == LARGEST I SAW THAT COVERED EXTENT OF UNREST = ONLY USA TODAY. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Len Colby Posted March 17, 2013 Share Posted March 17, 2013 LOL so you're downgrading your claim from 'martial law was declared' to 'there's not enough press coverage,' protests after police shootings are more 'dog bites man' than viceversa "ONLY USA TODAY" Huh? there was a link to CNN in my previous post. It was also covered by the NY Times which has national and international readership and was covered by AP (link) http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/3rd-day-protests-nyc-teen-shot-police-18726191 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Len Colby Posted March 17, 2013 Share Posted March 17, 2013 Even the NRA rejects the stupid hysteria over the ammo purchases. http://www.nraila.org/news-issues/articles/2012/federal-law-enforcement-agencies-buy-ammunition.aspx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven Gaal Posted March 17, 2013 Author Share Posted March 17, 2013 LOL so you're downgrading your claim from 'martial law was declared' to 'there's not enough press coverage,' protests after police shootings are more 'dog bites man' than viceversa "ONLY USA TODAY" Huh? there was a link to CNN in my previous post. It was also covered by the NY Times which has national and international readership and was covered by AP (link) http://abcnews.go.co...police-18726191 ++++++++++++++++++++ THE MSM SHOULD HAVE USED THE INCIDENT FOR THE PUSH FOR GUN CONTROL ,BUT DID NOT <THUS THE MSM WANTED TO DOWNPLAY THIS INCIDENT. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Len Colby Posted March 17, 2013 Share Posted March 17, 2013 LOL so you're downgrading your claim from 'martial law was declared' to 'there's not enough press coverage,' protests after police shootings are more 'dog bites man' than viceversa "ONLY USA TODAY" Huh? there was a link to CNN in my previous post. It was also covered by the NY Times which has national and international readership and was covered by AP (link) http://abcnews.go.co...police-18726191 ++++++++++++++++++++ THE MSM SHOULD HAVE USED THE INCIDENT FOR THE PUSH FOR GUN CONTROL ,BUT DID NOT <THUS THE MSM WANTED TO DOWNPLAY THIS INCIDENT. Huh? Whether or not Gray had a gun is disputed, and even if he had one we don't know how he got it. So this is not (yet) relevant to the gun control debate. And what exactly is your point? 'The gun grabbing media isn't using this to push their agenda and this proves that...'? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven Gaal Posted March 17, 2013 Author Share Posted March 17, 2013 (edited) and this proves that...' (Colby)Looting information is not conducive for public consumption at this time. BUT NOT NOW.INVEST NOW !!! INVEST NOW !!!!! Kimani Gray Shooting Death Prompts Looting, Rioting in Brooklyn ...www.usnews.com › News › NewsgramCachedYou +1'd this publicly. Undo by Steven Nelson - in 54 Google+ circles - More by Steven Nelson 3 days ago – New York City police arrested at least 46 people late Wednesday during a third night of angry protests following the shooting death of ... More by Steven Nelson #################### What Can Happen If the US Government Siezes Private Bank Accounts From an Armed Popuation?Posted on March 17, 2013 by The Watchdog //lonestarwatchdofg http://www.thelonestarwatchdog.com/2013/03/17/what-can-happen-if-the-us-government-siezes-private-bank-accounts-from-an-armed-popuation/ #####################NOT TIME YET FOR POSSIBLE FLASE FLAG CYBER ATTACK ????? just asking US: Hackers in Iran responsible for cyberattacks - Technology on ...www.nbcnews.com/.../us-hackers-iran-responsible-cyberattacks-1C64...CachedU.S. authorities believe that Iranian-based hackers were responsible for ... Among the banks that have experienced massive distributed denial-of-service attacks have ... Read more: Panetta: Cyber intruders have already infiltrated US systems ... BE AFRAID, BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID !!!BOO !!!!!!!!!!! Edited March 18, 2013 by Steven Gaal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Len Colby Posted March 19, 2013 Share Posted March 19, 2013 and this proves that...' (Colby)Looting information is not conducive for public consumption at this time. BUT NOT NOW.INVEST NOW !!! INVEST NOW !!!!! Kimani Gray Shooting Death Prompts Looting, Rioting in Brooklyn ... www.usnews.com › News › NewsgramCached You +1'd this publicly. Undo by Steven Nelson - in 54 Google+ circles - More by Steven Nelson 3 days ago – New York City police arrested at least 46 people late Wednesday during a third night of angry protests following the shooting death of ... More by Steven Nelson #################### What exactly is your point? Looting following protests in nothing new. What Can Happen If the US Government Siezes Private Bank Accounts From an Armed Popuation? Posted on March 17, 2013 by The Watchdog //lonestarwatchdofg http://www.thelonest...rmed-popuation/ ##################### Paranoid drivel NOT TIME YET FOR POSSIBLE FLASE FLAG CYBER ATTACK ????? just asking US: Hackers in Iran responsible for cyberattacks - Technology on ...www.nbcnews.com/.../us-hackers-iran-responsible-cyberattacks-1C64...CachedU.S. authorities believe that Iranian-based hackers were responsible for ... Among the banks that have experienced massive distributed denial-of-service attacks have ... Read more: Panetta: Cyber intruders have already infiltrated US systems ... BE AFRAID, BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID !!!BOO !!!!!!!!!!! Considering this story is 6 months-old it seems unlike to be used as a pretext for an attack, got any evidence the Iranians were NOT responsible? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven Gaal Posted March 19, 2013 Author Share Posted March 19, 2013 Considering this story is 6 months-old it seems unlike to be used as a pretext for an attack, got any evidence the Iranians were NOT responsible? // end Colby ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ CYBER ATTACK IS PERFECT FOR FALSE FLAG, CANT TELL WHO DOES ATTACK Jake Whitney Daily Beast 2/21/13 ============================= (According to the war correspondent Michael Hastings, DoD now employs 27,000 media professionals at $4.7 billion per year and even creates phony Facebook and Twitter accounts of pro-American Afghans.) This huge PR machine has been accompanied by a strategy of public disengagement—through policies like the elimination of the draft, a refusal to raise wartime taxes, and an increasing reliance on long-range weapons like drones. All of this makes war far less impactful to most Americans. ############################ The Great Cyber-Warfare Scam China-bashing made easy by Justin Raimondo, February 20, 2013 The War Party never sleeps: there are always new variations of war propaganda coming ’round the bend. With the coming of the internet, the latest manufactured "threat" to rear its head is "cyber-warfare," which is now being touted by the Obama administration and its media fan club as the Next Big Scary Thing – but what are the facts? The first fact we need to integrate into our analysis is that "cyber-security" isn’t a science, it’s an industry: that is, the entities issuing alarming reports of this lurking threat are for profit companies mainly if not exclusively concerned with selling a product. And while the "threat landscape," as the jargon phrases it, is potentially very diverse, with a number of countries and non-state actors potential combatants, our cyber-warriors have targeted China as the main danger to our cybernetic security – the Yellow Peril of the Internet Age. They’re stealing our technology, our secrets, and infiltrating our very homes! This is largely baloney, as Jeffrey Carr, founder of Project Grey Goose and Taia Global, a cyber-security firm, and author of Inside Cyber Warfare, points out: "t’s good business today to blame China. I know from experience that many corporations, government and DOD organizations are more eager to buy cyber threat data that claims to focus on the PRC than any other nation state. When the cyber security industry issues PRC-centric reports like this one without performing any alternative analysis of the collected data, and when the readership of these reports are government and corporate officials without the depth of knowledge to critically analyze what they’re reading (i.e., when they trust the report’s authors to do the thinking for them), we wind up being in the position that we’re in today – easily fooled into looking in one direction when we have an entire threat landscape left unattended. We got into that position because InfoSec vendors have been left alone to define the threat landscape based upon their product offerings. In other words, vendors only tell customers to worry about the threats that their products can protect them from and they only tell them to worry about the actors that they can identify (or think that they can identify). This has resulted in a security awareness clusterxxxx of epic proportions." The "cyber-threat" from China has been much in the news lately, and any number of self-proclaimed "experts" with a financial stake in hyping this latest bogeyman have been pointing an accusing finger at Beijing whenever some government agency or big corporation discovers cyber-vandals in its domain. The latest is a report issued by a private cyber-security firm, Mandiant, which claims these attacks are occurring under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). It is, of course, just a coincidence that this accusation limns a recent National Intelligence Estimate, which – according to the New York Times, itself supposedly victimized by Chinese hackers – "makes a strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army officers or are contractors working for commands like [PLA] Unit 61398." Yet, as Carr discusses here, the Mandiant report has several analytic flaws. To begin with, the "mission area," i.e. the nature and alleged goal of these intrusions, is supposed to identify China as the culprit because the latest APT (cyber-security jargon for "advanced persistent threat") "steals intellectual property from English-speaking organizations," and that these thefts coincide with the technical requirements of China’s current Five-Year Plan. This kind of "logic" ought to make your BS-detector go haywire, recalling Carr’s warning that there’s a bad case of perception bias at work here: that’s because other nations, and non-state actors such as criminal gangs, also launch cyber-attacks on English-speaking organizations, which in many instances parallel the interests contained in China’s Five-Year Plan. Russia, France, Israel, and a number of other countries have advanced cyber-warfare capabilities, and haven’t hesitated to use them for purposes of industrial espionage, among other reasons: Eastern European gangsters are also players in this game. Yet there is no mention of these alternatives in the Mandiant report: according to them, it’s all about China. Mandiant claims that because the rash of recent intrusions have involved operations requiring hundreds of operators, that only a nation-state with "military-grade operations" could possibly have carried them out. Yet more than 30 nations are currently running "military-grade" operations, as Carr informs us: why pick on China? Well, says Mandiant, because the intrusions they analyzed used a Shanghai phone number to register an email account, for one. Yet this proves exactly nothing. Okay then, what about the fact that "two of four network ‘home’ Shanghai blocs are assigned to the Pudong New Area," where the PLA’s Unit 61398 is located? This also proves exactly nothing: the Pudong New Area has over 5 million inhabitants. It is smack dab in the center of China’s booming commercial and hi-tech metropolis. Ask yourself how many IP addresses originate from this area. Oh, but one of the "PLA" hackers’ "self-identified location is the Pudong New Area." Really? So what? Aside from the demographic information supplied above, one has to wonder if these people really believe everything they see on the Internet is true. C’mon, guys! The New York Times has been pushing the Yellow Cyber-Peril theme ever since their computer system was hacked, but the question of who exactly was responsible for that intrusion is by no means proved. In a Times piece on the subject – with the rather whiney headline "Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months" – we again come across Mandiant pointing to the Chinese military as the culprit, but their case against the PLA falls apart under the most cursory inspection. For example, Mandiant’s "analysis" is based in part on the observation that these alleged Chinese "Hacker teams regularly began work, for the most part, at 8 a.m. Beijing time. Usually they continued for a standard work day, but sometimes the hacking persisted until midnight. Occasionally, the attacks stopped for two-week periods, Mandiant said, though the reason was not clear." Bull hockey. There are a number of other countries in the same time zone that have active hacker communities. The idea that the timing of these attacks somehow pinpoints "Chinese hackers" associated with the PLA is laughable. As Carr puts it: "The hackers could have been from anywhere in the world. The time zone that Mandiant imagines as a Beijing workday could easily apply to a workday in Bangkok, Singapore, Taiwan, Tibet, Seoul, and even Tallinn – all of whom have active hacker populations." Mandiant – hired by the Times to investigate the intrusion, and currently in negotiations with the New York Times Company over a possible ongoing business relationship – cites the fact that the intrusions supposed originated at some of the “same universities used by the Chinese military to attack U.S. military contractors in the past.” Yet there are many universities located in the Jinan area Mandiant homes in on, and geolocation in this instance, as Carr says, "means absolutely nothing." He also raises an important point: if the Chinese military was behind the Times hack, then why would they launch these attacks from a location previously identified with the PLA? That’s seems rather too obvious, especially in view of the lengths to which hackers go to cover their tracks. Wouldn’t China’s Ministry of State Security, their official intelligence agency, be assigned that task? Yet their facilities are located in Beijing, over 200 miles away from Jinan. Most people are ignorant of the technical details utilized by commercial enterprises like Mandiant to gin up an alleged "threat." One supposedly scary tool used by the "Chinese" hackers is a Remote Access Tool, and we are told that the specific methods used in the past by alleged Chinese hackers are matched to the Times intrusion. This is just plain wrong, however, as Carr explains: "The article mentioned the hackers use of a Remote Access Tool (RAT). One such widely used tool is called GhostRAT. The fact that it was used in an attack against the Dalai Lama in 2008 (GhostNet) doesn’t mean that all of the later attacks which used this tool originated with the same group. In fact, even the GhostNet researchers refrained from attributing this attack to China’s government. "Another tool whose use is often blamed on Chinese hackers is the ‘xKungFoo script.’ Like GhostRAT, the xKungFoo script is widely available for anyone to use so even if it was originally created by a Chinese hacker, it doesn’t mean that it is used by Chinese hackers in all instances. I personally know Russian, English, and Indian hackers who write and speak Chinese." This is simple logic: you don’t have to be a cyberwarfare "expert" to realize there are many possibilities when it comes to identifying the people behind the methods. If you’ve already decided who is the perpetrator, however, then Mandiant’s accusations directed at Beijing fit neatly into the available "evidence." That’s how confirmation bias works. The major piece of "evidence" supposedly pointing to the Chinese government is the timing of the intrusion: just as research for a Times story on the financial dealings of a top Chinese government official, Wen JaiBo, was "nearing completion." According to the Times, the hackers gained access to email accounts belonging to Shanghai bureau chief David Barboza, author of the Wen expose, as well as Jim Yardley, bureau chief covering South Asia. Yet the Wen connection is contradicted in the very next paragraph of the Times‘s own account, which says: "’Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,’ said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times." So what’s the connection to the Wen story? In addition, Yardley had nothing to do with the Wen story, and yet his email was also breached, along with the passwords of 53 employees who are not in the Times newsroom. So what does this add up to? A big fat zero, as far as evidence of China’s involvement is concerned. China is merely the go-to cyber-villain of the moment, and this is certainly true where Mandiant is concerned. The same kind of dicey "evidence" is being used to accuse Iran – you saw this coming, didn’t you? Again, the tech-ignorant New York Times is in the lead, with a story echoing the claims of US officials that Tehran was behind the recent cyber-attacks launched against several American banks. You can almost hear the spooky music in the first two paragraphs of the piece, by Nicole Perlroth and Quentin Hardy, which gives an account of how the hackers slowed down and disabled banking sites, and then goes on to say: "There was something disturbingly different about the wave of online attacks on American banks in recent weeks. Security researchers say that instead of exploiting individual computers, the attackers engineered networks of computers in data centers, transforming the online equivalent of a few yapping Chihuahuas into a pack of fire-breathing Godzillas." Godzilla’s on the loose! And it’s an Iranian Godzilla! Yikes! "The skill required to carry out attacks on this scale has convinced United States government officials and security researchers that they are the work of Iran, most likely in retaliation for economic sanctions and online attacks by the United States. "’There is no doubt within the U.S. government that Iran is behind these attacks,’ said James A. Lewis, a former official in the State and Commerce Departments and a computer security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington." The skill required to carry out these attacks was minimal. As Roel Schouwenberg, senior researcher at Kaspersky Labs, put it: "We can confirm that the attacks being reported are happening; however, the malware being used, known as ItsOKNoProblemBro, is far from sophisticated. It’s really rather simple. It’s also only one part of the puzzle but it seems to be effective, which is all that matters to the attackers. Going strictly by the publicly known technical details, we don’t see enough evidence that would categorize this operation as something only a nation-state sponsored actor could pull off." More "evidence" offered in support of the "Iran-did-it" theory is that these attacks did not garner any information: no data systems were breached. It was, in short, pure cyber-malice directed at American banks. If this is supposed to somehow prove the Iranians are the culprits, then it is weak tea indeed: because there are any number of groups who hate American bankers, including, I would venture, the vast majority of the American people. These DDOS attacks seem more like the sort of thing we might expect from a group like "Anonymous" than from a state actor such as Iran. Of course, the paucity of evidence didn’t stop Sen. Joe Lieberman from declaring: "I don’t believe these were just hackers who were skilled enough to cause disruption of the websites. I think this was done by Iran … and I believe it was a response to the increasingly strong economic sanctions that the United States and our European allies have put on Iranian financial institutions." As is the case with Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, which our own spooks have said does not presently exist, the technical details are obscure to most of us, and therefore this realm is given over to "experts," both real and imagined. To Sen. Lieberman and all too many in the media, it’s just a matter of picking and choosing your "experts," and making the "facts" fit your preconceived notions. Aside from ginning up conflict with the War Party’s chosen targets, the whole cyber-war scare-mongering campaign, whether the alleged "threat" is said to be emanating from China, Iran, or wherever, is also very convenient for proponents of Internet regulation who want to install back doors on every web site, and every software system, so the feds can "trace" these alleged "cyber-terrorists." It is, in short, a scam, part and parcel of a political campaign to rein in the wild and wooly – and largely unregulated – Internet, and make it more amenable to the interests of our wise rulers. The mystification of science, and the culture of "expertise," has greatly aided the War Party in their propaganda efforts. Instead of making up stories about babies being bayoneted in their cribs – although there is still some of that – we are given mind-numbingly technical explanations that point to purported acts of "cyber-terrorism" carried out by China, Iran, or the villain-of-the-moment. Except that the supposed "evidence" turns out to based on non-credible assumptions and faulty technical analysis. Remember, we’ve been through this sort of thing before: all the "intelligence" supposedly pointed to the irrefutable "fact" that Iraq "weapons of mass destruction," which it was about to launch against its neighbors. That turned out to be a lie. Much of this baloney came wrapped up in impressive-sounding technical jargon, and was validated by the media’s chosen "experts."Has anybody learned anything from that experience? I’m thinking in particular of the members of the Fourth Estate, otherwise known as "journalists." The answer, unfortunately, seems to be no. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Len Colby Posted March 20, 2013 Share Posted March 20, 2013 My question "got any evidence the Iranians were NOT responsible? " still stands. From the Times article Mr. Lewis said the amount of traffic flooding American banking sites was “multiple times” the amount that Russia directed at Estonia in a monthlong online assaultin 2007 that nearly crippled the Baltic nation. American officials have not offered any technical evidence to back up their claims, but computer security experts say the recent attacks showed a level of sophistication far beyond that of amateur hackers. Also, the hackers chose to pursue disruption, not money: another earmark of state-sponsored attacks, the experts said. “The scale, the scope and the effectiveness of these attacks have been unprecedented,” said Carl Herberger, vice president of security solutions at Radware, a security firm that has been investigating the attacks on behalf of banks and cloud service providers. “There have never been this many financial institutions under this much duress.” And still waiting for any evidence the USG will use this as a pretext for war, since it is widely acknowledged the US directed cyber attacks against Iran they really wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on. The Raimondo piece was TL:DR but I skimmed it his main counter argument seems to be his contention (without evidence) that "These DDOS attacks seem more like the sort of thing we might expect from a group like "Anonymous" than from a state actor such as Iran." the size and sophistication of the attacks seems to preclude that an hacktivist normally claim credit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven Gaal Posted March 20, 2013 Author Share Posted March 20, 2013 (edited) CYBER ATTACK IS PERFECT FOR FALSE FLAG, CANT TELL WHO DOES ATTACK =============== And still waiting for any evidence the USG will use this as a pretext for war, since it is widely acknowledged the US directed cyber attacks against Iran they really wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on. The Raimondo piece was TL:DR // END COLBY ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ SUMMATION RAIMONDO CYBER ATTACK IS PERFECT FOR FALSE FLAG, CANT TELL WHO DOES ATTACK ++++++++++++++++ And still waiting for any evidence the USG will use this as a pretext for war, since it is widely acknowledged the US directed cyber attacks against Iran they really wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on. // end Colby +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ************************************************* ####################################### THE USA HAS A LONG HISTORY OF FALSE FLAG WHICH I HAVE POSTED ABOUT MANY TIMES ((US directed cyber attacks against Iran they really wouldn't have much of a leg to stand on. // COLBY)) WHAT THE MOTHER #?!@K are you talking about ?????? THE MAIN STREAM MEDIA , NSA/DOD and NIST WILL SAY SO that IRAN DID IT AND COLBY WILL AFFIRM IT AS THE TRUTH. (past is prologue) ***************** YOU ARE WAY WAY BEYOND RIDICULOUS !!! CYBER ATTACK IS PERFECT FOR FALSE FLAG, CANT TELL WHO DOES ATTACK +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The same kind of dicey "evidence" is being used to accuse Iran – you saw this coming, didn’t you? Again, the tech-ignorant New York Times is in the lead, with a story echoing the claims of US officials that Tehran was behind the recent cyber-attacks launched against several American banks. You can almost hear the spooky music in the first two paragraphs of the piece, by Nicole Perlroth and Quentin Hardy, which gives an account of how the hackers slowed down and disabled banking sites, and then goes on to say: "There was something disturbingly different about the wave of online attacks on American banks in recent weeks. Security researchers say that instead of exploiting individual computers, the attackers engineered networks of computers in data centers, transforming the online equivalent of a few yapping Chihuahuas into a pack of fire-breathing Godzillas." Godzilla’s on the loose! And it’s an Iranian Godzilla! Yikes! +++++++++++++++++++++++++ Colby runs away from Irainian Godzilla after genuflecting to the NYT....way beyond rediciulous. Edited March 20, 2013 by Steven Gaal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Len Colby Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 As previously observed you're better at insulting and cutting n' pasting than arguing your case, get back to us with evidence 1) the cyber attacks will be used as a pretext for war, 2) Iran was NOT responsible. At best Raimondo (no known expertise in computer science) produced evidence that the case for Iran's guilt was overstated Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven Gaal Posted March 22, 2013 Author Share Posted March 22, 2013 (edited) USA DISINFO IRAN = SUN RISES IN EAST ,SETS IN WEST ....both constant/continual and reliable. Iran Disinfo Watch: The AP Gets Thrown Another Curveball By Christian Stork on Dec 4, 2012 The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the impartial international body in charge of enforcing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and supposedly trustworthy source on Iran’s nuclear program, may have been badly compromised through planted intelligence in an effort to bolster unfounded arguments that Iran is doing work towards a nuclear weapon. The latest evidence to that effect came on November 27, when the Associated Press (AP) published an “exclusive” titled, “Graph Suggests Iran Working On Bomb,” by George Jahn. The article was the latest in a series of highly misleading stories from the Vienna-based reporter concerning Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, and the suspicious information published within is indicative of much of the flimsy intelligence mustered against Iran at the IAEA. Claiming to have obtained proof that “Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon,” Jahn admitted that the diagram “was leaked by officials from a country critical of Iran’s atomic program to bolster their arguments that Iran’s nuclear program must be halted before it produces a weapon,” on the “condition that they and their country not be named.” Devoid of any official markings or even a date, the crude diagram is supposedly one of several used as evidence for a controversial November 2011 IAEA report that raised multiple questions, but fell short of direct accusations, about possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program. The diagram, as well as the bulk of the other intelligence referenced in that report, were not obtained directly by the IAEA itself but admittedly received via other agency “member states.” According to AP, the graph displays “a bell curve — with variables of time in micro-seconds, and power and energy both in kilotons — the traditional measurement of the energy output, and hence the destructive power of nuclear weapons.” As Nima Shirazi of Columbia University’s Gulf/2000 Project points out however, “[it] shows nothing more than a probability density function, that is, an abstract visual aid depicting the theoretical behavior of a random variable to take on any given value.” Such normal distribution curves can be plotted with nearly any data set and are not specific to nuclear physics at all. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists—the premier non-technical trade journal of nuclear policy discussion—concurs, adding that “even if authentic, it would not qualify as proof of a nuclear weapons program. Besides the issue of authenticity, the diagram features quite a massive error, which is unlikely to have been made by research scientists working at a national level.” It details the error, remarking upon the graph’s two curves: [O]ne that plots the energy versus time, and another that plots the power output versus time, presumably from a fission device. But these two curves do not correspond: If the energy curve is correct, then the peak power should be much lower — around 300 million (3×108) kt per second, instead of the currently stated 17 trillion (1.7 x1013) kt per second. As is, the diagram features a nearly million-fold error. The Bulletin goes on to conclude, “This diagram does nothing more than indicate either slipshod analysis or an amateurish hoax.” Many in the United States point to the IAEA’s 2011 report—in which this “slipshod” graph is alluded to—as the latest evidence of Iranian duplicity regarding its nuclear program, although the IAEA to this day cannot account for any uranium diversion from civilian facilities, and it confirms that Iran has complied with all of its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Safeguards Agreement. A 2011 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) agrees, restating earlier conclusions by America’s intelligence community that Iran had a nascent nuclear weapons program briefly from 2002-2003, which was then shut down. A History of Reliance As mentioned above, the November 2011 IAEA report relies on intelligence provided by various “member states.” From George Jahn’s descriptions, this most recent graph published by AP is referred to only in section C.8 of the IAEA report (paragraph 52) as follows [emphasis mine]: Information provided to the Agency by two Member States relating to modelling studies alleged to have been conducted in 2008 and 2009 by Iran is of particular concern… According to that information, the studies involved the modelling of spherical geometries, consisting of components of the core of an HEU [highly enriched uranium, CS] nuclear device subjected to shock compression, for their neutronic behaviour at high density, and a determination of the subsequent nuclear explosive yield. The information also identifies models said to have been used in those studies and the results of these calculations, which the Agency has seen. This isn’t the first time George Jahn has regurgitated dubious claims from diplomats critical of Iran. On September 11 of this year a nearly identical “exclusive” was published by AP (save for the scary diagram) under Mr. Jahn’s byline, despite the fact that all the information contained within came from the November 2011 report, issued nearly a year prior. The article asserted that new “intelligence shows that Iran has advanced its work on calculating the destructive power of an atomic warhead through a series of computer models that it ran sometime within the past three years.” Might this most-recent graph, ridiculed by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists as a “hoax,” be a sample of that intelligence? In yet another “exclusive” on May 13, Jahn cited a drawing (yes, drawing)—provided by “an official” from “an IAEA member country that is severely critical of Iran’s assertions that its nuclear activities are peaceful” as proof of the existence of “an explosives containment chamber of the type needed for nuclear arms-related tests.” The drawing “shows a chamber of the type needed for nuclear arms-related tests,” according to the AP’s caption, and was “provided to [AP] by an official…who said it proves the structure exists.” This accusation was also detailed in the IAEA report released six months earlier. In all three instances, Jahn’s uncritical parroting is bolstered by the same go-to experts on the Iranian nuclear program—David Albright and Olli Heinonen, two former-IAEA officials who have a history of hyping tenuous claims concerning nuclear development in states antagonistic to the West, like Iraq. In nearly all of his reporting on Iran, Jahn follows a predictably familiar script: relying on officials for leaks, granting them immunity from the scrutiny their claims would reasonably produce, followed by hypothetical confirmation of why those leaks might be credible from Albright and Heinonen. From the May 13 drawing report [my emphasis]: A former senior IAEA official said he believes the drawing is accurate. Olli Heinonen, until last year the U.N. nuclear agency’s deputy director general in charge of the Iran file, said it was “very similar” to a photo he recently saw that he believes to be the pressure chamber the IAEA suspects is at Parchin. He said even the colors of the computer-generated drawing matched that of the photo he had but declined to go into the origins of the photo to protect his source In response to the criticism AP sustained following the most recent November 27 piece about the “amateurish hoax” diagram, George Jahn conceded the graph’s serious errors in a December 1 report, but maintains an alarmist thrust with even more anonymous quotes and notional corroboration [my emphasis]: But a senior diplomat familiar with the probe of Iran by the IAEA told the AP on Friday that the agency suspects that Iranian scientists calculating a nuclear yield intentionally simplified the diagram to make it comprehensible to Iranian government officials to whom they were presenting it. He said that when the right data are plugged in, the yield is indeed 50 kilotons. The diplomat, who is considered neutral on Iran’s nuclear program, spoke only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to divulge intelligence. As seen by the AP, the data on the left-hand vertical side of the diagram is listed in kilotons per second. But David Albright…told the AP that when that legend is substituted with another — joules per 10 nanoseconds — the yield comes out to around 50 kilotons. From Russia With Love In similar fashion, David Albright’s contributions to this fear mongering were acutely displayed in the lead-up to the November 2011 IAEA report. In addition to the dubious evidence of nuclear weapons test “modelling,” as the most recent diagram purports to show, the only new accusations added to the November report were whispers of an unnamed foreign expert being employed to help Iran construct a detonation system for a nuclear weapon. A November 6 story in the Washington Post by Joby Warrick identified the expert as Vyacheslav Danilenko, a “former Soviet nuclear scientist.” How did the Post discover his name? Albright gave a “private briefing” for “intelligence professionals” the week prior, in which he outed Danilenko as the scientist contracted by Iran’s Physics Research Center in the 1990’s. The Ukrainian was alleged to be instrumental in the covert weapons program by “giving lectures and sharing research papers on developing and testing an explosives package.” He “openly acknowledged his role” by giving such talks and sharing research, although assumed his work was “limited to assisting civilian engineering projects” with no military dimensions, according to the Post (which means according to Albright). The November 2011 IAEA report stated that the agency had “strong indications” that Iran had developed a “high-explosions initiation system” with the help “of a foreign expert who was not only knowledgeable on these technologies, but who, a Member State has informed the Agency, worked for much of his career in the nuclear weapon program of the country of his origin.” The agency report goes on to assert that that “foreign expert”—clearly Danilenko—was in Iran “ostensibly to assist in the development of a facility and techniques for making ultra dispersed diamonds (UDDs) or nanodiamonds” and “also lectured on explosive physics and its applications,” subtly implying that nanodiamonds were merely a cover for his real purpose in Iran [emphasis mine]. The member state responsible for this information evidently learned that Danilenko had worked for one of the Soviet Union’s premier scientific institutions, well known for its work on nuclear weapons development—the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics in Snezhinsk, Russia. Sounds serious enough to merit concern, right? A closer examination of Danilenko’s career tells a different story. Beginning in the 1960’s, Danilenko worked in a section of the Institute that specialized in the synthesis of diamonds. According to Ultrananocrystalline Diamond: Synthesis, Properties, and Applications, Danilenko pioneered the development of large-scale technology for producing ultradispersed diamonds (UDD’s). Danilenko then became a principal for Nanogroup in 1993, a company dedicated to meeting the global demand for nanodiamonds. In 2011 he was even invited to speak at the Drexel University’s AJ Nanotechnology Institute in Philadelphia on the subject. As the blogger who first seriously examined these allegations notes, “Some years ago Iran launched a big Nano Technology Initiative which includes Iranian research on detonation nanodiamonds (pdf). Iran is officially planing [sic] to produce them on [an] industrial scale.” Producing nanodiamonds via explosives requires large and insulated steel containers that utilize water for cooling, a structure for which Danilenko apparently retains a patent. In the May 13 AP piece, the suspicious drawing that supposedly resembles a photo seen by Heinonen is a rendering of the alleged implosions testing chamber, which happens to look and function in a manner similar to the one that produces nanodiamonds. Given Danilenko’s cooperation with the IAEA and his field of expertise, it’s not likely he’s covertly teaching nuclear secrets. But is it possible that this type of nanodiamond technology could have dual-use potential for nuclear implosion tests? Former IAEA senior weapons inspector Robert Kelley strongly doubts it. “You don’t do hydrodynamic testing of nuclear bombs in containers,” he said to The Guardian. “All of such tests would be done at outdoor firing sites, not in a building next to a major highway.” He added in a separate interview that any nuclear weapon design tests would necessitate “far more explosives” than the 70 kg capacity claimed for the cylinder at Parchin, the suspected location of the nanodiamond chamber. The rest of the information submitted by member states and cited in the 2011 IAEA report is culled from the same source: a cache of supposedly pilfered top-secret Iranian military documents that detail a number of wide-ranging activities with possible nuclear weapons development applications across two decades. These evidentiary papers, some in print and others digital, are referred to collectively as the “alleged studies documentation” by the IAEA. Studying the “Alleged Studies” The “alleged studies documentation” was delivered to the IAEA on a single hard drive after showing up at a U.S. consulate in Turkey in 2003. The cache contained “a large volume of documentation (including correspondence, reports, view graphs from presentations, videos and engineering drawings),” according to the IAEA’s November 2011 report. Despite periodic leaks to the Western press since 2005, the “alleged studies” were not officially cited in an agency report until 2008 because then-Director General Mohamed ElBaradei considered them to be forgeries. The three main activities highlighted in the documents are as follows: 1) A pair of flow sheets showing a process for uranium conversion. 2) Experiments on “exploding bridgewire” (EBW) technology (similar to the implosion technology utilized in nanodiamond creation). 3) Studies on the redesign of the nose cone of the Shahab-3 missile to ostensibly accommodate a nuclear payload. As detailed in an exhaustive expose in the Middle East Policy Council Journal (MEPCJ),however, the documents display eight major indications of tampering and/or fraud, vindicating ElBaradei’s initial wariness of them. Furthermore, how the documents were acquired and then smuggled out of Iran into Turkey has always been a mystery. Multiple stories were floated in the American and German press about high-level Iranian defections, with various contradictions as detailed further in the MEPCJ piece. The more plausible scenario is that they were handed off to the U.S. embassy in Turkey by the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), the political arm of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), an exiled Iranian terrorist organization known for cooperating with the United States and Israel. The Western press had deemed NCRI a reliable source of intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program after its announcement in August 2002 of the nuclear sites at Natanz and Arak. It was revealed afterward, however, that NCRI received that information from Israeli intelligence. Israel had a history with the MEK going back to 1995, when the Israeli government helped beam NCRI radio broadcasts from Paris to Iran. In 2006, an Israeli diplomat corroborated to The New Yorker that his government found the MEK “useful.” Israeli authors Yossi Melman and Meir Javadanfar explained the organization’s usefulness in 2005: A way to ‘launder’ information from Western intelligence to the IAEA was found so that agencies and their sources could be protected. Information is ‘filtered’ to the IAEA via Iranian opposition groups, especially the National Resistance Council of Iran. The MEK was labeled a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the U.S. State Department for its killings of U.S. servicemen and contractors in the 1970’s. It was recently removed from the FTO list after an extensive lobbying campaign on its behalf, despite news reports that the group remains militantly active. Citing U.S. officials, NBC News revealed on February 9 that MEK was conducting the assassination campaign of Iranian civilian nuclear scientists while being armed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service. The West vs. Iran: Amano e Mano Despite the suggestions of fraud surrounding the “alleged studies documentation” and its mysterious acquisition, as well as the suspicious nature of other information submitted to the agency, current IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano, a former Japanese diplomat, has repeatedly issued papers based on these dubious sources since he began his tenure in 2009. In March 2011, Amano dissolved the agency’s Office of External Relations and Policy Coordination (EXPO), which was the source of skepticism about many of the assessments received during ElBaradei’s tenure. The Guardian reported this March that “ElBaradei’s advisers from Expo were moved sideways in the organisation, and the department’s functions have been absorbed by the director-general’s office.” The publication of State Department cables by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks revealed Amano’s secret courtship of Washington, particularly concerning the IAEA’s stance on Iran. In October 2009, the US mission in Vienna relayed back to Foggy Bottom that Amano “was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program,” calling him the “DG [Director General] of all states, but in agreement with us.” Intelligence fabrication, as deceitful as it is, is regrettably commonplace in the power games between antagonistic countries. However, for a major news organization like AP to uncritically pass on such information is tantamount to journalistic malpractice. It was such behavior by the news media, deliberate or otherwise, that led the American public to vigorously support an aggressive war on Iraq that is now seen as an atrocity. GRAPHIC: http://3.bp.blogspot...r-with-iran.jpg Edited March 22, 2013 by Steven Gaal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Len Colby Posted March 24, 2013 Share Posted March 24, 2013 The only hit for this on Google News was to the AP website so few other outlets if any picked it up. The two scientists who wrote the BAS response think it's a fake the one cited by AP 'said the diagram looks genuine but seems to be designed more "to understand the process" than as part of a blueprint for an actual weapon in the making. [but noted] "The yield is too big". The only evidence it was part of the IAEA report was an anonymous source but it being part of the report would undermine the claims of the experts who doubted it could be legit. Shirazi seems not to have any expertise in math or science, perhaps you can e-mail him and ask him what “not specific to nuclear physics” could produce a KT energy-output in microseconds The rest was TL:DR, you don't read the stuff you post here so why should anyone else? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven Gaal Posted March 24, 2013 Author Share Posted March 24, 2013 (edited) FOR ANY WHO ARE INTERESTED GOOGLE IAEA anonymous source. anonymous is a common source for leaked IAEA material over YEARS & YEARS ...... ==== I posted before about the false story of diamond production conflated with Nuke weapons years ago re Iran. Edited March 24, 2013 by Steven Gaal Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Len Colby Posted March 27, 2013 Share Posted March 27, 2013 Their is a difference between a well respected UN agency citing anonymous sources and a journalist labelled inaccurate (by your source) citing them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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