Stratfor and Daryl Hannah

In this Stratfor article Scott Stewart discusses the evolution of terrorist methodology from the 1800s through the current day and suggests some possible emerging trends.

He breaks his discussion into documents, explosives and databases. In each area he gives brief discussion of their evolution, ending with a discussion of current trends.

Since the word evolution was mentioned, my mind naturally turned to movies featuring cave babes in fur bikinis as I sought the article's Hot Stratfor Babe. With that in mind, I selected Daryl Hannah who played Ayla, the female lead in Clan of the Cave Bear.

I saw Clan of the Cave Bear, but must confess I don't remember much about it other then it was ridiculous. It's made more ridiculous than the usual 'Cave Babes in Fur Bikinis' movie because it tries to be serious. For example, the characters grunt in a made up cave man language with subtitles and such like.

Anyway, if I recall correctly, as a child blonde Ayla is separated from her tribe and ends up being adopted by a tribe of doltish brunettes. She grows up to be Daryl Hannah, who gets a ton of grief because she's blonde. Lucky for her, she is a sort of feminist super genius who invents nearly everything: fire, the wheel, whatever. In fact, I think Ayla even wrote the original lyrics to I am Woman, only they were a series of grunts before they got translated to English for Helen Reddy to sing.

Clan of the Cave Bear was a flop, but Ms Hannah has had a very successful Hollywood career, although she's increasingly having to do television these days.

On the personal side she's been an activist for several years, getting herself arrested at on protest or another. Her latest has been getting arrested protesting the Keystone Pipeline. Gee, thanks Daryl -- I appreciate your efforts to get me to pay the Saudi's more for their oil. 


Evolution and Trends in Terrorism Tradecraft
By Scott Stewart, October 11, 2012

The terrorist tradecraft discussed in last week's Security Weekly does not happen in isolation. The practitioners of terrorist tradecraft conduct their activities in the midst of other people -- the authorities attempting to identify them and thwart their plans as well as civilians. Terrorist tradecraft also does not remain static. It is constantly evolving. These changes are prompted not only by countermeasures put in place to prevent terrorist attacks but also by advances in technology -- a powerful force that can serve to either nullify old tradecraft practices or to provide new tools to the purveyors of terror.

Terrorism is an enduring reality. While geopolitical changes may cause a shift in the actors who employ terrorism as a tactic, terrorism will continue to be used no matter what the next geopolitical cycle brings. It is, and will continue to be, a tactic used by militant actors who want to confront a militarily superior enemy. Focusing on the tradecraft used in attacks and charting its changes and trends not only permits observers to understand what is happening and why but also provides an opportunity to forecast what is coming next.

Documents

In the early terrorist plots of the late 1800s, many of the foundational tradecraft requirements were aided by the general simplicity of the times. Among the foundational tradecraft requirements discussed last week was procuring identification documents. Public records were very sparse, did not usually contain people's photographs and tended to be decentralized and not easily searched. (This is still true in some parts of the world today, such as in Afghanistan and Somalia.) There were no universal identification cards such as driver licenses, because automobiles had not yet become common. Passports and visas were not widely required for travel until after World War I, and even then the records of passport and visa issuance as well as traveler entries and exits were localized, hand-written entries into ledgers and were hard to search.

During this time, it was not difficult for Irish Fenian, nihilist or anarchist terrorist actors to travel, rent safe-houses or raise and transfer funds. Communication was certainly more difficult for everyone at that time -- authorities as well as terrorists. The mail system was slow, and while telegrams could be sent quickly, they were seen by many people. Law enforcement agencies did not communicate or coordinate very well across jurisdictional lines within one country, much less on an international scale.

During World War I, concerns over spies and saboteurs caused important changes to international travel, including stricter passport and visa requirements. This also had an impact on terrorist actors, such as Irish Republican Army members traveling to and from the United States or England, but early passports, visas and other identification documents were often hand-written and easily forged or altered. During this era, it was also still quite easy to assume the identity of an infant or young child who had died, because birth and death records were not often cross-referenced -- especially if they happened in different locations. This practice is referred to as an infant death identity in document-fraud investigations. Nazi and Soviet espionage agents used infant death identity quite frequently, which resulted in changes to the way records were kept, but domestic and international terrorist operatives continued to use infant death identities into the 1960s and 1970s.

Advances in technology in the 20th century allowed countries to make their identification documents more resistant, but not immune, to counterfeiting and alteration. The real difficulty in using counterfeit or altered documents started when the documents were linked to a central computerized database. This meant that counterfeit passports and visas did not show up in the databases and allowed a quick photo comparison to ensure that passports with altered photos could not be as easily used. In 1988, Japanese Red Army bombmaker Yu Kikumura was able to enter the United States using an altered Japanese passport.

In 1992, al Qaeda bombmaker Ahmed Ajaj was arrested trying to come through immigration at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport using a Swedish passport in another name altered to bear his photo. His partner, Abdul Basit, ditched the altered passport he used to board the flight in Karachi, Pakistan, and used an authentic Iraqi passport in the name Ramzi Yousef to claim political asylum. In the 9/11 plot, and in all the follow-on al Qaeda plots directed against the United Sates, al Qaeda operatives have used authentic travel documents to enter, or attempt to enter, the United States. Some of the 9/11 operatives did commit document fraud in relation to driver licenses and state identification cards, but as outlined in the 9/11 Commission Report, that fraud almost resulted in the unraveling of the plot.

Changes in technology and enforcement in the United States and Europe have caused changes in identity and travel tradecraft for transnational jihadists, who are now searching for "clean skin" operatives who are unknown to law enforcement and who have the ability to travel internationally using legitimate travel documents.

Explosives

Bombing has been a staple of terrorism since Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators' failed attempt to destroy the British Parliament in 1605 in the so-called Gunpowder Plot. The invention of dynamite in 1867 was a very big boon for early terrorists, who no longer had to use black powder, a low explosive, as the main charge in their devices. Dynamite was not only more stable and less sensitive to moisture than black powder but was also more powerful. Dynamite was widely used by Irish Fenians in their attacks, but perhaps the image of the anarchist bombthrower is the most iconic of that period.

In the age of modern terrorism, bombmakers have had the luxury of access to high-powered military explosives such as TNT, C-4 and Semtex. Technologies such as shaped charges, platter charges and explosively formed penetrators have also increased the impact of these powerful explosive compounds. Another development that has greatly altered the art of bombmaking has been the advent of microelectronics. Bombmakers can use sophisticated timers to activate a device days or even weeks after it is placed. They can also use sensors that detect motion, light, the presence of metal objects or changes in altitude in order to detonate the explosive device. Command-detonated devices using radio signals or cell phones have also been widely employed.

Perhaps one of the most influential bombmakers in the modern terrorist era is Abu Ibrahim, a former member of Black September, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the 15 May Organization. Ibrahim is often referred to as the "grandfather of all bombmakers" for his innovative improvised explosive device design and his willingness to train other bombmakers in his dark arts. Ibrahim was an early adopter of electronics in his designs.

During the 1970s and 1980s, state sponsorship did a lot to help advance bombmaking tradecraft, as sabotage experts from the Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi passed on training and technology. (The Eastern bloc was also a very important source of funding and identification documents during this period.) In addition, state sponsorship meant that sponsors, such as Libya, could use the diplomatic pouch to transport weapons and explosive components to terrorist operatives in places like London and Paris.

Controls on the purchase of explosives, and even on items like ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which can be readily used to make homemade explosive mixtures, have made it more difficult in recent years to make improvised explosive mixtures. This has caused bombmakers to change to mixtures made from more readily available precursors, such as acetone and peroxide. But these mixtures tend to be not only more dangerous to brew -- the Palestinians refer to triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, as "the mother of Satan" -- they also have a limited shelf life, are less stable and more difficult to transport and correctly synthesize. In 2009, would-be New York City subway bomber Najibullah Zazi was frustrated in his attempts to manufacture viable TATP.

In the realm of targets and tactics, we've talked elsewhere of the arms race in aviation security and how it has caused the threat to aircraft to evolve, with the next likely step being non-metallic explosive devices hidden inside the bodies of suicide attackers. There has also been an evolution in the targeting of Western interests abroad. Embassies have become harder targets and Western hotels have been increasingly more desirable targets, although the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi may shift terrorists' focus back to vulnerable diplomatic missions in volatile locations.

Databases

Perhaps one of the most powerful inhibitors of terrorist tradecraft has been the use of computerized databases, allowing authorities to crunch a lot of data. One of the first well-documented uses of computers to locate terrorist suspects was the massive effort undertaken by the German Federal Criminal Police in the 1970s to combat the Red Army Faction. The German police created a database and then cross-referenced its information on a wide variety of indices. They then created a profile of the Red Army Faction safe-house with features such as young people living together, paying their rent and utility bills in cash and not registering with the local government or registering their motor vehicles. When a computer search identified addresses that matched the profile, they then dispatched detectives to investigate these possible safe-houses in person. This campaign was very successful in helping round up the first generation of Red Army Faction operatives.

Lists of terrorist suspects and their aliases have also proved quite useful in inhibiting terrorist travel, but it has not been without its failures or criticism. The U.S. State Department first adopted a database called TIPOFF in the 1980s designed to prevent terrorists from getting visas. The system was later turned it into the Visas Viper system after the 9/11 attacks. The United States has created the Terrorist Screening Center, which is charged with consolidating all the various U.S. government watch lists as well as administering the controversial terrorist watch list and the no-fly list.

Computers are also being used to monitor terrorist communication, whether by telephone, satellite phone or the Internet. But like the watch lists, these efforts have proved to be quite controversial.

Seizing or freezing bank accounts associated with known terrorists and efforts to crack down on charities that were funding terrorist groups have been somewhat successful in limiting the money moving to terrorist entities. But the presence of significant informal money transfer networks has made it impossible to totally stop the flow. The ability of terrorist groups to use narcotics sales and other criminal activity to fund themselves has also been hard to stop.

Trends

Since the 9/11 attacks, the United States and its allies have spent billions of dollars on security improvements and have made great efforts to increase security and to counter the tradecraft used by terrorist groups. It is now more difficult for terrorist operatives to travel to the United States and Europe -- as evidenced by the lack of serious attacks and by the calls of groups such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the al Qaeda core group for grassroots terrorist operatives to conduct simple attacks where they are rather than travel overseas for training or to wage jihad. It has also led them to recruit individuals who have travel documents like Richard Reid, Najibullah Zazi and Faisal Shahzad for attacks rather than send well-trained operatives to conduct them.

This inability to conduct attacks in the West and the frustration it causes, along with the downfall of the transnational al Qaeda core organization, may be causing the remaining jihadist groups to focus more on operations in their local areas -- places where they have the skilled operatives and materiel to conduct successful attacks.

This means that Western diplomatic missions, hotels and businesses located in these areas will remain vulnerable to attack. With these militant groups in possession of shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles like the SA-7, there is also a lingering concern over the possibility of an attack against a Western aircraft in such areas.

Evolution and Trends in Terrorism Tradecraft is republished with permission of Stratfor.

Clint Eastwood

Float through the weekend with Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra.

  

    

How I prepared for the VP debate

I went out to my boat and hung a new mainsail on it. Then I sat in the cockpit and watched the sun set over the marina. Much more pleasant than listening to the talking heads on the boob tube.
   

Big dancers

Choreographer by Anne Troake. Chris Greeley, Ed Breen and Rick Hunt as the drivers dancing to the music of Justin Hayes.
     

The ghostly elite

Click image to enlarge

Above is a picture of nine sovereigns of Europe that was taken at the funeral of England's King Edward VII. Standing, L-R: King Haakon VII of Norway, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, King Manoel of Portugal, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, King George I of Greece, King Albert of the Belgians. Seated, L-R: King Alfonso XIII of Spain, King George V of England, King Frederick VIII of Denmark.

Tsar Nicholas of Russia was missing, but Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was present at the funeral. Of course it was Ferdinand's assassination that set the wheels of WWI into motion. Many if these leaders, in some way, shape or form, were responsible for Europe spinning out of control and descending into carnage. Fittingly, these Kings were either removed, or had their power greatly diminished for their stupidity.

Not so fittingly, a lot of men also died in the mud because of their stupidity.

All to often that is the price of the foolishness of elites. Karl Marx, a foolish man in his own right, once said that history repeats itself, "the first as tragedy, then as farce." Not always. Sometimes tragedy follow tragedy. This time, let us hope for farce, it might be the best we'll get.
   

Guess who's coming to dinner

Here's another fight to get you over the hump in hump day. Our hero, if you can call him that, watches his friend get killed, goes berserk, breaks out of his bonds and unleashes some Insane Mantis style kung fu on a bad guy and his hapless minions. As for the post's title? Well, you'll have to watch to the end.
  

Stratfor and Paula Prentiss

In this Stratfor article Friedman uses Syria as a discussion of Obama's foreign policy of disengagement. He srgues that the U.S. is stepping back to allow regional parties establish equilibriums in their own neighborhoods.

I think it is a very weak analysis. Where I think he really misses the ball is in not recognizing the extent to which Obama seems to be trying to enmesh the U.S. foreign policy into transnational organizations.

I was also baffled by his conclusion, which states Obama's doctrines are the new normal and that even an Obama loss wouldn't significantly change things. Just as Reagan dumped Carter's policies, or for that matter Obama dumped Bush's, I'm sure the Obama doctrine will be deep-sixed should Romney win.

For the article's Hot Stratfor Babe, since we were talking about a fairly passive foreign policy, the movie The Stepford Wives sprung to my mind as I imagine it did for you as well. Of the cast I selected Paula Prentiss, who played the brainwashed Bobbie Markowe.

The Stepford Wives is a wonderful movie in the paranoia genre. In it the local men's association has figured out how to turn their feminist wives into docile, and beautiful, reincarnations of 1950s house wives. The result is a film who's social commentary, which lands with all the subtlety of a 10 pound anvil dropped on your head from a 100 story building, can be easily ignored while you enjoy the pure goofiness of the premiss.

As for Ms Prentiss, she had a successful second tier movie career which was probably held back because of her dislike for the Hollywood scene. She's retired for the most part from the screen, but she still is active in theater.


The Emerging Doctrine of the United States
By George Friedman, October 9, 2012

Over the past weekend, rumors began to emerge that the Syrian opposition would allow elements of the al Assad regime to remain in Syria and participate in the new government. Rumors have become Syria's prime export, and as such they should not be taken too seriously. Nevertheless, what is happening in Syria is significant for a new foreign doctrine emerging in the United States -- a doctrine in which the United States does not take primary responsibility for events, but which allows regional crises to play out until a new regional balance is reached. Whether a good or bad policy -- and that is partly what the U.S. presidential race is about -- it is real, and it flows from lessons learned.

Threats against the United States are many and complex, but Washington's main priority is ensuring that none of those threats challenge its fundamental interests. Somewhat simplistically, this boils down to mitigating threats against U.S. control of the seas by preventing the emergence of a Eurasian power able to marshal resources toward that end. It also includes preventing the development of a substantial intercontinental nuclear capability that could threaten the United States if a country is undeterred by U.S. military power for whatever reason. There are obviously other interests, but certainly these interests are fundamental.

Therefore, U.S. interest in what is happening in the Western Pacific is understandable. But even there, the United States is, at least for now, allowing regional forces to engage each other in a struggle that has not yet affected the area's balance of power. U.S. allies and proxies, including the Philippines, Vietnam and Japan, have been playing chess in the region's seas without a direct imposition of U.S. naval power -- even though such a prospect appears possible.

Lessons Learned

The roots of this policy lie in Iraq. Iran and Iraq are historical rivals; they fought an extended war in the 1980s with massive casualties. A balance of power existed between the two that neither was comfortable with but that neither could overcome. They contained each other with minimal external involvement.

The U.S. intervention in Iraq had many causes but one overwhelming consequence: In destroying Saddam Hussein's regime, a regime that was at least as monstrous as Moammar Gadhafi's or Bashar al Assad's, the United States destroyed the regional balance of power with Iran. The United States also miscalculated the consequences of the invasion and faced substantial resistance. When the United States calculated that withdrawal was the most prudent course -- a decision made during the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration -- Iran consequently gained power and a greater sense of security. Perhaps such outcomes should have been expected, but since a forced withdrawal was unexpected, the consequences didn't clearly follow and warnings went unheeded.

If Iraq was the major and critical lesson on the consequences of intervention, Libya was the smaller and less significant lesson that drove it home. The United States did not want to get involved in Libya. Following the logic of the new policy, Libya did not represent a threat to U.S. interests. It was the Europeans, particularly the French, who argued that the human rights threats posed by the Gadhafi regime had to be countered and that those threats could quickly and efficiently be countered from the air. Initially, the U.S. position was that France and its allies were free to involve themselves, but the United States did not wish to intervene.

This rapidly shifted as the Europeans mounted an air campaign. They found that the Gadhafi regime did not collapse merely because French aircraft entered Libyan airspace. They also found that the campaign was going to be longer and more difficult than they anticipated. At this point committed to maintaining its coalition with the Europeans, the United States found itself in the position of either breaking with its coalition or participating in the air campaign. It chose the latter, seeing the commitment as minimal and supporting the alliance as a prior consideration.

Libya and Iraq taught us two lessons. The first was that campaigns designed to topple brutal dictators do not necessarily yield better regimes. Instead of the brutality of tyrants, the brutality of chaos and smaller tyrants emerged. The second lesson, well learned in Iraq, is that the world does not necessarily admire interventions for the sake of human rights. The United States also learned that the world's position can shift with startling rapidity from demanding U.S. action to condemning U.S. action. Moreover, Washington discovered that intervention can unleash virulently anti-American forces that will kill U.S. diplomats. Once the United States enters the campaign, however reluctantly and in however marginal a role, it will be the United States that will be held accountable by much of the world -- certainly by the inhabitants of the country experiencing the intervention. As in Iraq, on a vastly smaller scale, intervention carries with it unexpected consequences.

These lessons have informed U.S. policy toward Syria, which affects only some U.S. interests. However, any U.S. intervention in Syria would constitute both an effort and a risk disproportionate to those interests. Particularly after Libya, the French and other Europeans realized that their own ability to intervene in Syria was insufficient without the Americans, so they declined to intervene. Of course, this predated the killing of U.S. diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, but it did not predate the fact that the intervention in Libya surprised planners by its length and by the difficulty of creating a successor regime less brutal than the one it replaced. The United States was not prepared to intervene with conventional military force.

That is not to say the United States did not have an interest in Syria. Specifically, Washington did not want Syria to become an Iranian puppet that would allow Tehran's influence to stretch through Iraq to the Mediterranean. The United States had been content with the Syrian regime while it was simply a partner of Iran rather than Iran's subordinate. However, the United States foresaw Syria as a subordinate of Iran if the al Assad regime survived. The United States wanted Iran blocked, and that meant the displacement of the al Assad regime. It did not mean Washington wanted to intervene militarily, except possibly through aid and training potentially delivered by U.S. special operations forces -- a lighter intervention than others advocated.

Essential Interests

The U.S. solution is instructive of the emerging doctrine. First, the United States accepted that al Assad, like Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi, was a tyrant. But it did not accept the idea that al Assad's fall would create a morally superior regime. In any event, it expected the internal forces in Syria to deal with al Assad and was prepared to allow this to play out. Second, the United States expected regional powers to address the Syrian question if they wished. This meant primarily Turkey and to a lesser degree Saudi Arabia. From the American point of view, the Turks and Saudis had an even greater interest in circumscribing an Iranian sphere of influence, and they had far greater levers to determine the outcome in Syria. Israel is, of course, a regional power, but it was in no position to intervene: The Israelis lacked the power to impose a solution, they could not occupy Syria, and Israeli support for any Syrian faction would delegitimize that faction immediately. Any intervention would have to be regional and driven by each participant's national interests.

The Turks realized that their own national interest, while certainly affected by Syria, did not require a major military intervention, which would have been difficult to execute and which would have had an unknown outcome. The Saudis and Qataris, never prepared to intervene directly, did what they could covertly, using money, arms and religiously motivated fighters to influence events. But no country was prepared to risk too much to shape events in Syria. They were prepared to use indirect power rather than conventional military force. As a result, the conflict remains unresolved.

This has forced both the Syrian regime and the rebels to recognize the unlikelihood of outright military victory. Iran's support for the regime and the various sources of support for the Syrian opposition have proved indecisive. Rumors of political compromise are emerging accordingly.

We see this doctrine at work in Iran as well. Tehran is developing nuclear weapons, which may threaten Israel. At the same time, the United States is not prepared to engage in a war with Iran, nor is it prepared to underwrite the Israeli attack with added military support. It is using an inefficient means of pressure -- sanctions -- which appears to have had some effect with the rapid depreciation of the Iranian currency. But the United States is not looking to resolve the Iranian issue, nor is it prepared to take primary responsibility for it unless Iran becomes a threat to fundamental U.S. interests. It is content to let events unfold and act only when there is no other choice.

Under the emerging doctrine, the absence of an overwhelming American interest means that the fate of a country like Syria is in the hands of the Syrian people or neighboring countries. The United States is unwilling to take on the cost and calumny of trying to solve the problem. It is less a form of isolationism than a recognition of the limits of power and interest. Not everything that happens in the world requires or justifies American intervention.

If maintained, this doctrine will force the world to reconsider many things. On a recent trip in Europe and the Caucasus, I was constantly asked what the United States would do on various issues. I responded by saying it would do remarkably little and that it was up to them to act. This caused interesting consternation. Many who condemn U.S. hegemony also seem to demand it. There is a shift under way that they have not yet noticed -- except for an absence that they regard as an American failure. My attempt to explain it as the new normal did not always work.

Given that there is a U.S. presidential election under way, this doctrine, which has quietly emerged under Obama, appears to conflict with the views of Mitt Romney, a point I made in a previous article. My core argument on foreign policy is that reality, not presidents or policy papers, makes foreign policy. The United States has entered a period in which it must move from military domination to more subtle manipulation, and more important, allow events to take their course. This is a maturation of U.S. foreign policy, not a degradation. Most important, it is happening out of impersonal forces that will shape whoever wins the U.S. presidential election and whatever he might want. Whether he wishes to increase U.S. assertiveness out of national interest, or to protect human rights, the United States is changing the model by which it operates. Overextended, it is redesigning its operating system to focus on the essentials and accept that much of the world, unessential to the United States, will be free to evolve as it will.

This does not mean that the United States will disengage from world affairs. It controls the world's oceans and generates almost a quarter of the world's gross domestic product. While disengagement is impossible, controlled engagement, based on a realistic understanding of the national interest, is possible.

This will upset the international system, especially U.S. allies. It will also create stress in the United States both from the political left, which wants a humanitarian foreign policy, and the political right, which defines the national interest broadly. But the constraints of the past decade weigh heavily on the United States and therefore will change the way the world works.

The important point is that no one decided this new doctrine. It is emerging from the reality the United States faces. That is how powerful doctrines emerge. They manifest themselves first and are announced when everyone realizes that that is how things work.

The Emerging Doctrine of the United States is republished with permission of Stratfor.

Like a duck to water

Some ducks, which had been kept in captivity and away from water, are introduced to a pond for the first time. They don't like the water at first, but it doesn't take long and soon they're ducks being ducks (source).
  

Is there really a market for these things?

Click any image to enlarge

In case you've been waiting, your wait is over, floating hot tubs have finally hit the market. You just fill them with water and then heat the water to 100% with a wood stove. You're then ready for a leisurely sail, powered by either an electric or gasoline outboard, with your only worry being waves greater than 1 foot or the wakes of passing motorboats.    

Granted, they're built in the Netherlands and maybe boating is a bit different over there, but these Hot Tugs seem like they would have limited appeal, especially considering their price of between $11,600 to $21,400, and that's not including the cost to ship them shipped from Rotterdam.

I'm guessing these things are a lot better in theory than in practice.

Down at the Depot

Monday morning, start of the workweek blues by John Lee.

 

The humble cork

Click any image to enlarge

Cork is made from the bark of trees, most commonly the Cork Oak. The tree is indigenous to southern Europe and northern Africa, although Spain and Portugal combined account for over half of the commercial production of cork.

Ehen the trees mature their bark can be harvested every 9 years without harm. This series of photographs shows, from havest to finished product, the process of making a cork for a bottle. I expected the process to be automated, but it looks like it is very labor intensive.

I found them at Visboo's post Production of Corks. There are more pictures after the jump, and of course even more at the Visboo link.

Berlin hyperlapse

The above film combines time lapse and motion photography. It does it in a very striking and clever way. Normally, in films of this type, the motion component is slow and regular, in this film its creator, b-z00mi, jumps the motion component around quite a bit. The result harmonizes well with the time lapse element, and in the deemphasizes it at the same time. Altogether it is quite a nice effect.
 

Another unexpected angle

Click any image to enlarge

In my earlier post, An unexpected angle, I looked at a series of photographs by Menno Aden showing rooms photographed from their ceilings. The German photographer Michael H. Rohde has examined the same theme of viewing rooms from an entirely different perspective, but he's given a floor's eye view of them instead.

From La boite verte's post Vu du sol where there are a few more examples. 

Backyard roller coasters

This is a 1989 film of a backyard roller coaster called The Termite. The ride starts off on the roof and then drops to ground level. If you search YouTube for backyard roller coaster there are a surprising number of people fiddling around with them. It is an odd hobby I wasn't aware of.

As you might expect, they've made some progress over the years. Below is a modern one called the Blue Flash that is motorized and features a loop.

Yoani Sánchez has been arrested in Cuba

Yoani Sánchez is the Cuban dissident blogger who runs Generation Y, a site that's been on Flare's blog roll for some time. The BBC is reporting that she and her husband were arrested last week as they attempted to attend the trial of Angel Carromero.

The Cuban government is accusing Carromero of manslaughter in the death of a passenger in a car crash. Dissidents say Carromero was forced off the road and the charges are just an excuse to jail Carromero.

If you run a blog please mention her arrest. The Cuban government must not be allowed to operate in darkness. If enough of us protest perhaps the pressure will do Yoani and the other dissidents some good. 

If you're not familiar with her blog, her posts were always fascinating, with a sadness and grace about them that is hard to describe. The following is from the last post, They Won't Be Back Again, that appears on her blog

Festivals of Varadero, Girasoles Opina, Bossa Nova  in Havana… a parade of progressive and talented artists toured the country in the sixties, seventies and eighties. I followed their catchiest tunes and imitated their hairstyles and clothes. Humming “Who told you I was always laughing, never crying…” “What is it, what is it, that goes sighing through the bedrooms,” “Pedro Navaja, his hands always inside his coat.” I remember my sister laughing at me and saying that I had “Brazilian hair” because my profile reminded her of a table lamp, like the profile of María Betania and many other divas of that time. I adored that comparison! It was also a time when we frequently saw Ana Belén and Víctor Manuel on the national scene. Even “La Negra,” Mercedes Sosa, sang “Thanks to life,” in front of the national microphones.

However, these usual artists also stopped visiting us. Some died, others were disillusioned by the abuses and excesses of the Revolution and, most of them, simply stopped considering Cuba among the essential places in their itineraries. From the promotional posters that used to read, “Paris, Berlin, New York, Buenos Aires… Havana,” the largest of the Antilles disappeared. We went from being an obligatory stop to becoming a place where only the ideologically convinced appeared. Politics colored everything, determined arpeggios, tunes, choruses. The music was divided between artists committed to “the cause” and “traitors” who didn’t deserve to appear before a Cuban audience. The last time I heard Joaquin Sabina in a Havana theater, a girlfriend climbed up on the stage and planted a kiss on his cheek. “The caress of farewell” we later called that gesture, because after that we never saw hide nor hair of the Andalusian again. The character (or alter ego) of one of his sung stories said, about his visit to Cuba, “I’ll never return, I don’t enjoy it.”

For an earlier post about her see Social justice delivered via a fist.

UPDATE: I should have looked around a bit more. Babalu reports that she has been released. Well, even after the fact her arrest should be protested far and wide.

Hellooooooo visitors from Instapundit.Thanks for dropping by and please mention Yoani Sánchez and Angel Carromero problems if you run a blog.

Stratfor and Annabeth Gish

In this Stratfor article Scott Stewart discusses the pitfalls aspiring terrorists face in acquiring the skills they'll need to be successful. In particular, the need to join a group exposes both the terrorist wannabe and the terror cell to penetration by security forces or law enforcement.

Stewart discusses areas of terror cell vulnerability that exist prior to an attack: communications, funding, training and so forth. It is an interesting read about the phase of a terror cells evolution that is rarely considered by the public.

For the Hot Stratfor babe, since the article discussed groups of terrorists, I decided to focus on movies that featured groups of potential Hot Stratfor Babes. Oddly, considering the fact I've only scene bits and pieces of the movie and have tried my best to excise them from my memory, the film Mystic Pizza sprang to mind.

After careful deliberation, I selected Annabeth Gish from the cast to receive this highly coveted honor.

Ms Gish hails from Iowa and claims to be a distant relative of Lillian Gish. I don't know if that is true or just marketing hype,but regardless of the truth of the claim Annabeth has had a very successful albeit slightly low-key career. She's worked steadily since the 1990, generally appearing in several movies as well as on television. It also doesn't look like her career has shown any sign of slowing down.

Terrorism Tradecraft
By Scott Stewart, October 4, 2012

One of the distinctive features of Stratfor's terrorism and security analysis is its focus on the methodology of attacks. Of course, identifying those responsible for an attack is important, especially in ensuring that the perpetrators are brought to justice. But Stratfor believes that analyzing the way in which an attack was conducted is more important because it can prevent future attacks and protect potential victims. It is likewise important to recognize that even if a terrorist is killed or arrested, other groups and individuals share terrorist tactics. Sometimes this comes from direct interaction. For example, many of the Marxist terrorist groups that trained together in South Yemen, Lebanon and Libya in the 1980s employed similar tactics. Otherwise, a tactic's popularity is derived from its effectiveness. Indeed, several terrorist groups adopted airline hijacking in the 1960s and 1970s.

The mechanics of terrorism go far beyond target selection and the method of attack. This is especially true of aspiring transnational terrorists. Basic military skills may be helpful in waging terrorist attacks in areas where a militant group has access to men, weapons and targets -- such was the case with Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi, Libya -- but an entirely different set of skills is required to operate in a hostile environment or at a distance. This set of skills is known as terrorist tradecraft.

Foundational Skills

Before an attack can be planned, an aspiring terrorist group must be organized, funded and trained. Would-be terrorists in Libya, Yemen or Pakistan's North Waziristan agency can achieve these things relatively easily. However, aspiring terrorists in New York, London and Paris encounter more difficulty. The recent arrests of such terrorists in the West, most recently the Sept. 15 arrest of a would-be jihadist in Chicago, show just how difficult it can be to find like-minded individuals to organize a terrorist cell.

Therefore, operational security is a critical skill that must be mastered to protect the fledgling organization from infiltration by law enforcement or intelligence agencies. Every person brought into the group decreases the group's operational security. So the very existence of the group must remain hidden, and every new member must be thoroughly vetted to ensure they are not plants. As the organization matures and becomes involved in actual attacks, operational security will continue to be vitally important to the organization's success and survival.

A key sub-skill to operational security is the ability to procure false identification documents. False identification is required for more than just international travel; these documents are required for domestic travel as well as for commercial transactions, such as buying or renting vehicles, procuring safe-houses and purchasing firearms, explosives and other components of manufactured explosives and improvised explosive devices. False documents are more important for operatives or organizations that want to attack continually than they are for suicide bombers, provided the authorities do not know the identity of the bomber and provided the bomber can travel to the operational destination.

Establishing a secure form of communication is also a priority. As a terrorist group grows, communication tradecraft must evolve beyond the verbal communication. Naturally, the more members a group has, and the farther away they are from one another, the more challenging secure communication becomes.

Once a group is securely organized, the members must fund their operations. Indeed, the ability to transfer funds clandestinely is a skill closely related to communication. Funding varies greatly from organization and location. Some terrorist groups obtain funding from the surrounding population. In places where the group is seen as fighting a colonial power or a dictator, financial support may be willingly given. In other circumstances, the population may give support grudgingly through extortion or informal taxes levied by the terrorist group.

State sponsors are another source of funding, as are wealthy individuals sympathetic to the terrorists' causes. Terrorists also are funded through illegal activity, including large-scale narcotics sales, which are frequently used by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Taliban. Hezbollah generates revenue through cigarette tax fraud and through selling counterfeit goods and fake prescription drugs. Kidnapping is also an age-old method of funding terrorism.

The Attack

With organizational structure and funding in place, the terrorist organization can then turn to acquiring the skills necessary to conduct an attack. But to understand the tradecraft skills required to conduct an attack, one must first recognize that attacks do not happen randomly. They are the result of planning that follows a discernable attack cycle.

 

VIDEO: Stratfor on the Terrorist Attack Cycle  

The specific skills required to conduct an attack can range from constructing an improvised explosive device to marksmanship, to driving a truck or even piloting a jumbo jet. Sometimes these skills can be acquired legally by joining a gun club or attending driver or pilot training. In other instances, skills like bombmaking must be learned illicitly, either by trial and error or by attending a terrorist training camp.

Perhaps the most important tradecraft skill in the attack planning cycle is surveillance tradecraft, or the ability to observe a potential target without alerting anyone that the target is being watched. The vulnerabilities noted during surveillance are frequently used in selecting the target. Further surveillance is often used to plan the attack, and then another round of surveillance may be conducted as part of the attack to track the target's progress to the attack site.

Planning the attack is another tradecraft skill, which requires the ability to observe a target, identify a security weakness and then contrive a means to exploit the vulnerability. The best planners devise novel approaches, such as using jumbo jets as human-guided cruise missiles, or invent ways to disguise more traditional devices, like improvised explosive devices, in such items as dolls, radios, shoes, underwear, bottles of contact lens solution, brassieres and pregnancy prosthetics

An attack tradecraft component that has often proved vulnerable during the attack planning cycle is weapons acquisition. In fact, many attacks were disrupted when the plotters attempted to procure firearms or explosives. Operational security continues to be important during the attack planning phase. Operatives must be able to create believable cover stories to explain their presence and actions in certain locations. This cover ranges from clothing -- wearing a telephone company uniform while conducting a kidnapping or dressing as a road repair crewmember to plant an improvised explosive device, for example -- to renting a farm in order to purchase large quantities of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a common ingredient in improvised explosive mixtures.    

Projecting Power

Generally, these tradecraft skills are not concentrated in one member of a terrorist organization. Some people will be proficient at surveillance while some have a knack for making money or procuring weapons. Others may be good at manufacturing improvised explosive mixtures or assembling improvised explosive devices. However, this is true only of groups operating in their native areas.

The problem comes when a group wants to project power and conduct transnational attacks outside its core territory. In such a case, the group must identify a person proficient in a number of these tradecraft skills who can conduct an operation alone or with the assistance of a small group. This person must also be able to travel to the targeted country -- a requirement that has caused groups like al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to attempt transnational strikes from afar. The fact that the al Qaeda franchise's attempts to go long have all failed -- the underwear bomber and the printer bomb plots, for example -- demonstrates how difficult such plots are.

Many groups simply cannot plan and execute complex transnational attacks like the 9/11 plot and the Mumbai attacks. However, this does not mean they are not threats. Operating in their home territory, they are very capable of causing carnage. This holds true not only for jihadist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq or the Haqqani network in Pakistan, but also for groups like al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Somalia's al Shabaab and Nigeria's Boko Haram -- all of which have a demonstrated ability to conduct devastating attacks against targets located in their home territories. In fact, the impact of Ansar al-Sharia's Benghazi attack may be regarded as a pattern, which shows how an attack that required very little transnational terrorist tradecraft nonetheless had a large international impact.

Terrorism Tradecraft is republished with permission of Stratfor.
 

I Walk On Guilded Splinters

Get ready for a voodoo weekend with Papa Mali.

 

The latest Obama campaign merchandise

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Thanks to Al Gore, we now know that Obama's poor debate performance was caused by altitude sickness in the Mile High City. Never one to miss an opportunity, the Obama campaign has responded with designer air sickness bags. So, if you're an Obama backer show your support and get one today -- you may just need it for the next debate!
 

Riding bulls

Old campaign pictures

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Vintage Everyday has a nice set of old campaign photographs. I'm sure the campaigns were just as silly and nasty back then as they are today, but at least they didn't go on 24/7 365 days a year. I love Robert Taft holding the rooster -- his expression looks like Obama's during the first debate with Romney.

Nothing like this on stage, screen, radio, tv or cable baby!

Time for another fight scene to get us over the hump in hump day. In this one our hero Leroy seems to be in trouble when the villain starts shooting electricity out of his hands. However, as Leroy is being repeatedly dunked in a cistern he realizes that he too can squirt electricity out of his hands! With that knowledge he might now stand a chance in the fight.

Stratfor and Anne Baxter

In this Stratfor article Kamran Bokhari discusses the differences between the two main Islamic factions operating in the Middle East today: the Moslem Brotherhood and the Saudi-based Salafists.

The Slafists placed second in the Egyptian elections, and it was they who staged the protests at the american Embassy in Cairo, in part to challenge Marsi's Moselme Brotherhood domination. such confrontations are likely to continue, which make the already messy Islamic problem in the region even messier.

As for the article's Hot Stratfor Babe, since both Saudi Arabia and Egypt have deserts I turned to desert movies for inspiration. In the end I selected Five Graves to Cairo and so its female lead, Anne Baxter, gets the nod.

Five Graves to Cairo is an entertaining 1943 Billy Wilder movie. A British corporal gets lost in the desert and ends up in a remote hotel. Field Marshal Rommel shows up to use it as his head quarters for an attack on Egypt and mistakes the corporal for a German spy. Much skullduggery ensues, with Anne Baxter playing the part of a French woman bitter over the British abandoning the French at Dunkirk.

As for Ms Baxter, she's the grand daughter of Frank Lloyd Wright and entered acting at a young age. She started out on Broadway, where she continued to perform regularily, but also branched of into film and eventually television. She had a very long and successful career.


Salafism and Arab Democratization
By Kamran Bokhari, Vice President of Middle Eastern & South Asian Affairs, October 2, 2012

The outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011 brought significant attention to groups -- known as Islamists -- seeking to establish Islamic states in countries once ruled by secular autocrats. The bulk of this attention went to already established political groups such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which caused consternation in the West when its Freedom and Justice Party won control of both Egypt's parliament and its presidency.

Much less attention was paid to the Brotherhood's principal Islamist competitors, members of the ultraconservative Salafist movement, despite their second-place finish in Egypt's parliamentary elections. This changed in late September when certain Salafists played a key role in the unrest in reaction to an anti-Islamic video posted on the Internet.

Since then, Salafism has become the subject of much public discourse -- though as is often the case with unfamiliar subjects, questions are vastly more numerous than answers. This is compounded by the rapidity of its rise from a relatively minor, apolitical movement to an influential Islamist phenomenon.

Origins and Goals of Salafism

Modern Salafism is based on an austere reinterpretation of Islam, calling for Muslims to return to the original teachings outlined in the Koran and the practices of the Prophet Mohammed as understood by the earliest generation, i.e., the Companions of the Prophet. From the Salafist perspective, non-Islamic thought has contaminated the message of "true" Islam for centuries, and this excess must be jettisoned from the Islamic way of life.

Salafists are a minority among the global Muslim population and even among Islamists. Unlike members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists do not belong to a singular organization. Instead, the movement comprises a diffuse agglomeration of neighborhood preachers, societal groups and -- only very recently -- political parties, none of which are necessarily united in ideology.

In many ways, Salafism can be seen as a rejection of the political ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. For most of the movement's existence, it shunned politics -- and thus Islamism -- in favor of a focus on personal morality and individual piety, arguing that an Islamic state could not exist without Muslims first returning to the tenets of "true" Islam. This means Salafism also was at odds with the concept of jihadism -- itself a violent offshoot of Salafism -- as practiced by groups such as al Qaeda that sought to use force to manifest their Islamist ideology.

The Salafist movement could also afford to stay away from political activism in large part because it had a political backer in the government of Saudi Arabia. While many Salafists didn't agree with some of Riyadh's policies, its historical role as the birthplace of Salafism and role as the patron underwriting the global spread of Salafist thought kept the movement within the Saudi orbit.

This remained the case until the 1991 Gulf War, in which Saudi Arabia was forced to allow some 500,000 U.S. troops into the kingdom to protect itself from Baathist Iraq, after the latter's brief occupation of Kuwait. The move caused an uproar over the religious legitimacy of allowing non-Muslim soldiers on what many consider to be holy grounds, and it also gave way to a wider debate about the political state of affairs of the Saudi kingdom. Prominent scholars began publicly calling for reform, which led to Salafists in general engaging in political discourse and, eventually, to the concept of Salafism as an Islamist philosophy.

Nevertheless, Salafists would not become a political force for another two decades, simply because it takes time for an apolitical religious movement to develop a political philosophy. At the same time, the Saudi leadership was rallying the country's religious establishment to contain these newly politicized Salafists. The 9/11 attacks and subsequent U.S. actions against jihadism further advanced Salafist thought as the sect tried to hold on to its core values amid U.S.-led international pressure for reform, distinguish itself from jihadists and come up with a viable political alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Arab Spring

By the end of the 2000s, Salafism had spread across the Arab world, most notably to Egypt and Tunisia, expanding both the number of its adherents and its institutional scope, which now included social organizations engaged in charity, relief and community work. They stopped short of formal political groups, largely because of the autocratic regimes under which they lived, but they quietly developed the infrastructure for such groups. It was under these circumstances that the Salafists found themselves at the beginning of the Arab Spring.

The case of Egypt's Salafists is the most telling. Like the Muslim Brotherhood, they were caught unprepared when the popular agitation largely led by liberal youth groups broke out and began to consume decades-old secular autocratic regimes. While they eventually were able to overshadow the largely non-Islamist forces that played a key role in forcing the ouster of then-President Hosni Mubarak, they lacked the political machine that the Brotherhood had developed over the course of some 80 years. The result was the rise of various Salafist forces haphazardly trying to assert themselves in a post-authoritarian Egypt.

Several Egyptian Salafist groups applied for licenses to form political parties. Two prominent parties -- al-Nour and al-Asala -- emerged along with a host of individuals, such as Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, who ran as an independent candidate for president. The two Salafist parties banded together with the newly formed political wing of the former jihadist group Gamaa al-Islamiya -- the Building and Development Party -- to form the Islamist Bloc. The alliance was able to garner more than a quarter of ballots cast in the parliamentary polls late last year, coming in second place behind the Brotherhood.

What was most important about these Salafists participating in mainstream politics is that they embraced the electoral process after decades of having denounced democracy as un-Islamic. In other words, they ultimately adopted the approach of the Muslim Brotherhood, which they had hitherto vehemently rejected. This transformation has been more a rushed affair stemming from expediency rather than a natural ideological evolution.

There is an expectation that radical forces joining the political mainstream could, over time, lead to their de-radicalization. That may be true in the case of states with strong democratic systems, but in most Arab countries -- which are just now beginning their journey away from authoritarianism -- the Salafist embrace of electoral politics is likely to delay and perhaps even disrupt the democratization process and destabilize Egypt and by extension the region.

Much of this chaos will stem from the fact that the move to accept democratic politics has led to further fragmentation of the Salafist landscape. Many Salafists still are not comfortable with democracy, and those who have cautiously adopted it are divided into many factions. The result is that no one Salafist entity can speak for the bulk of the sect.

What Lies Ahead

Clearly, the Salafists are bereft of any tradition of civil dissent. That said, they have exhibited a strong sense of urgency to exercise their nascent freedom and engage in political activism. The outcome of this was the rioting that took place in reaction to the anti-Islamic film.

The Salafists are not just suffering from arrested political development; they face an intellectual discrepancy. On one hand, they wish to be part of the new democratic order and a mainstream player. On the other, they subscribe to a radical agenda that dictates the imposition of their stern interpretation of Islamic law across the Arab and Muslim world.

Their envisioned order is not just a problem for secularists, Christians, Jews and other minorities but also for more moderate Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood lost its monopoly on Islamism close to four decades ago but back then it didn't matter because the Brotherhood was an opposition movement. Now that the group has won political power in Egypt, the Salafists represent a threat to its political interests.

Some of the more politically savvy Salafists, especially the political parties, are willing to work with the Muslim Brotherhood toward the common goals of furthering the democratic transition and containing radical and militant tendencies. Ultimately, however, they seek to exploit the Brotherhood's pragmatism in order to undermine the mainstream Islamist movement's support among religious voters. Additionally, the Salafists are also trying to make use of their role as mediators between the Brotherhood-led government and the jihadists active in the Sinai region to enhance their bargaining power and lessen the Brotherhood's.

Salafists -- whether they operate through legal means or through raw street power -- can be expected to create problems for Egypt's new government led by President Mohammed Morsi, especially when it comes to foreign policy matters. A prime example is the recent case of the film-related violence, during which Morsi had a difficult time balancing the need to placate the masses at home and maintain a working relationship with the United States, upon which Egypt relies for its economic well-being. While the anger over the film is a passing phenomenon, the underlying dynamic persists.

There is also no shortage of issues for right-wing Islamists to exploit. U.S. imperatives in the region will continue to place the Morsi government in a tight spot and provide reasons for the Salafists to oppose Cairo's policies. Even more volatile than the dealings between the Morsi administration and Washington will be Israeli-Egyptian relations.

So far, Morsi has managed to avoid dealing too directly with Israel. But the Egyptian president and the Brotherhood cannot avoid this for too long. They know that they will face situations where they could be caught between the need to maintain peaceful relations with Israel and deal with Salafists taking advantage of the widespread anti-Israeli sentiment among Egyptians. This is one of the reasons Morsi and his associates have been speaking of revising the peace treaty with Israel, which is an attempt to manage the inevitable backlash on the home front.

Egypt's difficulties are particularly pronounced given the country's status as the leader of the Arab world, but Salafists of various stripes are slowly emerging as political stakeholders across the region, especially in Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. Democratization by its very nature is a messy affair in any context, but in the case of the Arab spring, Salafist entities can be expected to complicate political transitions and undermine stability and security in the Middle East.

The major challenge to stability in the Arab world thus lies only partially in the transition to democracy from autocracy. Greater than that is the challenge mainstream Islamists face from a complex and divided Salafist movement.

Salafism and Arab Democratization is republished with permission of Stratfor.

Atop an elevator shaft

In this video an elevator enthusiast discovers an unlocked machinery room for an pair of elevators. He sneaks in and gives a tour. First he goes over the motors and controllers, then he sticks his camera down a view port to give a view of the shaft.

Odd what one notices -- I noticed that, unlike adventure movies, there wasn't a ladder mounted in the wall that the hero could climb to get out of a tight spot. Alas, another movie trope shot to pieces.
     

Insects covered with dew

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David Chambon has taken a series of photographs of insects covered with dew. They're quite striking. These are just a few samples, there are more at his link.

they led me to wonder how dew effects the physiology of insects. Insects breathe via openings in their exoskeletons called spiracles. These are connected, not to lungs, but to a series of tubes called trachea that spread through their bodies and deliver oxygen. One would think the dew would starve parts of the body of oxygen every morning (not to mention when it rains). I wonder if dew and rain just slows their metabolism down?  

(found via Wall to Watch which also has pictures)

Careless Love

Monday morning, start of the workweek blues by Odetta.