Wrong CIA analysis triggered major 2003 terror alert

[maddezmom]

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A mistaken CIA analysis of an Arabic-language television broadcast triggered a major terror alert in United States in 2003 and the cancellation of nearly 30 international flights, NBC News said.

The color-coded terror alert system went from yellow to orange, after CIA agents thought they saw secret numbers encoded in the moving text at the bottom of the screen of an Al-Jazeera broadcast, NBC said late Monday.

The "scrawl" was thought to contain attack dates, flight numbers and geographic coordinates for targets, which included the White House, Seattle's tallest structure, the Space Needle, and even the small town of Tappahanock in Virginia.

For weeks after Christmas 2003, a high level terror alert was maintained leading to the cancellation of almost 30 international flights by Air France, British Airways, Continental and Aeromexico, the news service said.

more:http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050628/ts_alt_afp/usattacksintelligence_050628073312

[Spinzonner]

1. Hey, nobody's perfect

[deminks]

2. More like "Rove analysis"

I wonder if the CIA had much to do with this, like Iraq and probably 9/11/01.

From the article:

However, nothing was revealed to the public about the mistake until NBC News was told by unidentified senior US officials.

Tom Ridge, who was Secretary of Homeland Security at the time of the snafu, in an interview with NBC defended the CIA analysis at the time, although he did call it "bizarre, unique, unorthodox, unprecedented."

(end snip)

We suspected that they lied us into war for political purposes. It turned out to be true. We suspect that they lied about terror alerts for political purposes. I have no doubt that this will turn out to be true as well.

[CJCRANE]

14. Seems like Ridge was meant to be a "useful idiot" -

gullible enough and dumb enough to go along with what he was told.

on edit: British Airways and the other airlines should be pretty p*ssed off about this, this BS prob cost them a fortune in cancelled flights and delays.

[dArKeR]

24. I almost forgot about the "Color Coded Alerts"

[thebigidea]

3. these fucking idiots are starting to believe their own spin about Al-J

[DoYouEverWonder]

4. This is a bs excuse to cover up what they were really up to

The fact that these terror alerts were totally manufactured by the WH, HS and other Americans.


Code Orange: Is it based on an Internet Hoax?
Dec-23-03


So where is all this chatter really coming from? And who is Jeremy Reynalds and why should we care?

The brownshirts are out in force on the Internet all of a sudden. Suddenly, there are numerous reports of al Qaeda plans for another terrorist attack. However, most of these reports seem to be coming from one person. A Mr. Jeremy Reynalds. Reynalds has been posting on numerous sites about assorted al Qaeda threats that he finds while he monitors al Qaeda websites in his spare time. The main source of his latest threats is someone named Daleel_Almojahid...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=953199

[salin]

7. look at the timing... late dec 2003... dems primaries

were all the news coverage. Bush didn't get the lasting boost from capturing Saddam and the press was back to covering the dems leading up to Iowa.

[DoYouEverWonder]

8. All of the bogus terror alerts

always happened just when W needed a distraction the most.

I had a list some where with the dates of the alerts and the political event they were associated with. I'll post it later if I can find it.

[UpInArms]

23. check out the ratings game that they had!

look at the end of 2003 and the following spike on this polling chart

http://www.oldamericancentury.org/approval.bmp

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. Jeremy Reynalds - Talon News reporter

Yes, that's right, he's a buddy of 'Jeff Gannon':

http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:jXtCZ45Z6dAJ:www.talonnews.com/news/2004/april/0428_yahoo_againp.shtml+%22Jeremy+Reynalds%22+%22talon+news%22&hl=en

(link to Google cache, since Talon News has torn down its stories, after it was found out)

If this is BS, it's pretty desperate - saying you based you warnings on numerology. They look like complete idiots for doing it. The next thing, they'll be using Bible codes to tell us that Dean is the Antichrist ...

[DoYouEverWonder]

30. Coincidentally, Reynalds the self-made terrorist expert

hasn't written much about al Qaeda or terrorist threats since the election. He is back on and writing, just not about terrorism. I guess Bu$hCo doesn't need his special brand of noise making at the moment.

[CJCRANE]

5. So this is how they gather "intelligence"...

by watching TV?

[Supersedeas]

34. CSI reruns, remakes, and offshoots

[salin]

6. Go back and think about the timing, and tell me it was a mistake.

December - Saddam captured -- woohoo -- great bush coverage... for a week.

then no bush talk

all attention on the upcoming primaries - heck even in the aftermath of the saddam capture - dems were being discussed - in part due to Dean (then the perceived front runners) comment that he did not think that capture made us safer (note he didn't say it was a bad thing -but that was how it was framed) - why was this not good for the WH?

Bush was supposed to walk to reelection. And suddenly it was democrat democrat democrat Kerry Clark Dean Dean Gephardt Kerry Graham Edwards Clark Dean oh and Joementum! All over the news.

And damn if the dems weren't starting to raise money like bushco.

All that antibush talk getting free air time - over and over...

Didn't want to see that all the way through the primaries.

So - how to shut down some of the press on the primaries? Voila... terra 'lert - at Christmas time no less.

Remember what ole Ridge said after resigning HLS - that many times things that he saw did not warrant an alert or raising of the status - were used to justify raising it... and if I recall he admitted that sometimes it was used for political reasoning.

This is just a "cover" story - released just in time to give an echo for the idea that the pres to throw out that part of his message was that it was bad intel/analysts per the wmds claim -but that they were and are right about going to Iraq in any event.

[DeepModem Mom]

9. Constant terror alerts before the election, then, poof! -- none. nt

[salin]

12. More insidious was the talk of "likely attacks" by admin b4 vs after

the election.

Before the election Cheney (and others echoed) suggested that a terrorist attack on the US soil was likely to happen IF Kerry was elected (wtf?) - to fear people into voting for bush.

Then almost immediately after the election through the inaugeration various admin officials (military and hls types) started saying... it isn't a question of IF there will be another attack on US soil... it is a matter of WHEN. Why fear us again and more? Because they wanted to stave off lame duck status - follow us... and we will avert the iminent threat we keep telling you about...

but they stopped pushing that line ... months ago. Guess they realized that it didn't make them look too good or popular if they were admitting how lame they are - and it called attention to stories such as - how leaky our borders still are - how weak our inspections of containers (shipping) are... how much money was squandered in HUGE HLS contracts that were politically connected but had underqualified... too many stories about their own ineptness to keep reminding folks of it. But for a minute they tried.

[Rose Siding]

10. Here's a link to a handy timeline -David Kay quit that day

among other things...

snip>
December 18, 2003 -- 9/11 Chair Thomas Kean says the attacks were preventable. Source

Dec. 19 2003 -- A federal appeals court ruled the government can not detain U.S. citizen Jose Padilla indefinitely without pressing charges against him or allowing him access to the courts. Source

Same day -- The Wall Street Journal reports that auditors at the Pentagon are accusing Halliburton of refusing to hand over internal documents related to allegations that the oil service company overcharged the U.S. government in Iraq. Source

Same day -- David Kay quits, having found no WMDs. Source

Dec. 21, 2003 - Ridge raises the terror threat level just in time for the holidays. Source

http://juliusblog.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_juliusblog_archive.html#109156476570482138

[maddezmom]

11. thanks for the link

:thumbsup:

[Roland99]

13. Yeah, that's an awesome resource. And how many "terra" alerts since 11/04?

[Straight Shooter]

16. Thank you for that terror alert timeline. Bookmarked.

It's weird, by the time you know a pattern has developed with Little Boots and his gang, it's too hard to go back and track the coinkydinks.

I'd like to see a timeline of horrid news paralleled with distractions. For example, Abu Ghraib exposed and all of a sudden Nick Berg was beheaded. No one is ever going to convince me there wasn't something very nefarious going on with that timing.

Another example is that ship that was supposed to be sailing around, loaded with WMD or whatever. Anyone remember that?

And what happened to that missing plane? It was all over the news for a while, it was a big plane. And then -- poof! -- the news vanished as mysteriously as the plane.

[WannaJumpMyScooter]

22. Here is Julius' graphic of it... very telling

[dArKeR]

25. Every time on the downside one of these was issued

[Solly Mack]

15. So now they are busy explaining away their trumped up terror alerts

covering their bases, I suppose...

but what lies beneath?

[CJCRANE]

17. But this is the most lame, inane, insane

excuse/explanation ever. "The dog ate my homework" is a work of genius compared to this.

[Solly Mack]

18. It is pretty lame

but I assure you, some people will buy it.

[Igel]

20. I can't say they're lying.

Last summer, I translated a manufacturing document as part of a team. The process was always the same for given document: one person translates, another edits, a third proofs. At least one native English speaker, and at least one native source-language speaker.

The document dealt with a "seal", and used terms for the individual sections of the seal. I used the terms provided by our revered glossary; one was wrong, obviously so, and I fought with the editor. It was changed to something less clearly wrong, but still, I suspected, wrong. We fought. I lost, since I couldn't show I was clearly right. Hierarchies work that way.

A week or two later I got 5 more documents for the same part, different sizes. I rummaged through the project's records. Tech drawings, tech specs, over a dozen documents, all had the older, clearly wrong term, done at various times over the last year, by various translators, with both editors signing off on them. All wrong. Somebody was assigned to correct them. I fought over the term again, and finally over the use of the part. I gave up.

Two weeks later, all the documents were translated, edited, shipped, and sent to the client. I still convinced they were wrong, and I wasn't much better, I fretted over it; I approached the problem from a different angle, did a Yandex search, and five minutes later had webpages showing the part in different views, showing in detail how it was installed, worked, and what it was good for. A few minutes later, Google turned up similar pages in English.

They were for damned K-seals. Nearly a dozen professional tech translators, three editors, and a half dozen proofreaders had looked at the term in nearly two dozen lengthy documents, over the course of 12 months. No pressure. Lots of resources. Access to engineers from both countries. Every attempt to make obvious to us dweebs exactly what was going on. And we got it wrong.

If the CIA translators did indeed screw up, I'm certainly not going to sit in judgment.

[CJCRANE]

26. Yes,

but it says they found "hidden messages" in the "scrawl" of a mass-market TV station. That's not due to bad translation.

on edit: you can find hidden messages in anything if you really want to. Watch the film "Beautiful Mind" for examples of this.

[Neshanic]

28. Correct. No human involved apparently. Bad program....bad.

A program was used that scans the crawl for hidden items. They kept the receipt from Best Buy.

[Igel]

31. No, but it's what you get when you have translators and

analyst trying to play games under pressure.

We had a year to puzzle out a word, with the source trying to make sure we got it right, and with drawings, diagrams, and descriptions. We didn't. We were just thankful that, apparently, the documents were ignored, or at some point some engineer decided we were wrong. Hell, they probably hoisted the seals and measured them themselves, or compared our translation with the actual part--we could have called it a "frangilationary device", with a "degridgelring", and it wouldn't have mattered. Such is rocket science.

It would be much worse to be a translator and analyst, under what in retrospect looks like a paranoia-induced deadline, when any suspected source wouldn't want you to get it right, and with little or no additional information. Not a job I'd want.

Their supervisors didn't ignore their report, or decide it was wrong; and, had they, and the analyst turned out right, there'd have been hell to pay. As it was, they were wrong, and there's hell to pay.

I leave it to those that have never made a mistake on their jobs or coursework to render judgment.

[CJCRANE]

32. But isn't it kinda

strange that right after the November elections these "mistakes" totally stopped?

[demo dutch]

21. How convenient, let's blame everything on the CIA!

[Neshanic]

27. Last night's GENBC telescreen throw out to the masses.

Brian Williams with that look somewhere between sitting on a blunt stick and impending bowel movement, threw that juicy bit out there.

It's not Ridges fault. It's not the administrations fault. It's not anyone's fault...except the CIA! Surprise! Not only was it that it was their fault, they blamed a questionable scanning program; they had a pliant nerd on that said so.

So there you have it.

Monkey wipes hands and scarmbles away, this time with a puzzled Ridge.

[Norquist Nemesis]

29. And some accuse US of needing tinfoil hats. n/t

[BlueStatesForever]

33. This is more manipulation

The idea of "leaking" this story now, is to remind citizens about terrorist threats, without actually HAVING a terrorist threat.

Actually HAVING a terrorist threat would be too obvious.

[nolabels]

35. Like the boy who called wolf?

Okay this time we got it wrong but next time it will be real :woohoo::sarcasm::scared::sarcasm::woohoo:

Btw waiter: I will take one of those Woohoo sandwiches with the two slabs sarcasm melted around that scared meat middle, and hold the dressing

http://www.infowars.com/print/ps/market_manipulations.htm