CIA blunder on al-Jazeera 'terror messages' (The Guardian)

[Up2Late]

CIA blunder on al-Jazeera 'terror messages'

Gary Younge in New York and Vikram Dodd
Wednesday June 29, 2005
The Guardian

CIA analysts forced 30 flights to be cancelled and raised the US terror alert from yellow to orange because they thought that al-Qaida was sending hidden messages through the headlines of the Arabic television news channel al-Jazeera, it has been revealed

According to a report by NBC, CIA experts thought they had decoded messages that they believed gave dates, flight numbers and geographic coordinates for targets that included the White House, Seattle's Space Needle and even the small town of Tappahannock, Virginia, which has a population of 2,000.

"These credible sources suggest the possibility of attacks against the homeland around the holiday season and beyond," said the homeland security chief, Tom Ridge, at the time of the incident in December 2003.

But in an interview with NBC 18 months later he conceded that the intelligence analysis was "bizarre, unique, unorthodox, unprecedented", and that "speaking for myself I've got to admit to wondering whether or not it was credible. "Maybe that's very much the reason that you'd be worried about it, because you hadn't seen it before."

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1516940,00.html?gusrc=rss>
(more at link above)

[Judi Lynn]

1. Isn't this so sad? Can't believe grown people did this.

More from Up2Late's Guardian article:

Seven men - one French, one American and five Algerians - were questioned in Paris and released.

"The people with Arab-sounding names turned out to be, for example, a diplomat and a sports player. There were no terrorists," a police source told the newspaper Le Parisien at the time.

Al-Jazeera said the NBC report "vindicated" the network after repeated claims from the Bush administration and its allies that the broadcaster was linked to or sympathetic to terrorists. "We've always said these are politically motivated allegations."

The analysts were using a system called steganography, which examines hidden messages, in this case in video images.
(snip)

[lvx35]

2. Steno blues

Stenography is wierd stuff, you can find messages in anything if you look hard enough. I was studying Qabalah for awhile, which is jewish mysticism which associates letters and numbers with colors and names of God. One of the excercises you do is look around and associate colors you see with the names of god and angels, etc., like as a devotional thing. But because the colors are also associated with letters, I started seeing messages "spelled out" in the world around me...It was kinda spooky and freaked me out for awhile, but I realized it was all coincidence...but it seemed real enough at the time.

[magellan]

3. Patterns can be found in anything

...if you expect them to be there.

[lvx35]

4. Its true

Finding patterns in randomness, such as tea leaves or tarot cards is refered to as 'divination' by occultists.
I think it was Aliester Crowley who said "All divination resembles an attempt by a man born blind to obtain sight by getting blind drunk."
:)

[Moderator]

5. Duplicate

posted yesterday morning

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=1587707