The NSA, Then and Now, Here and There

From the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/02/world/middleeast/02qaeda.html?pagewanted=2&hp

"American officials say they still know little about how operatives communicate with Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri.

“There has to be some kind of communication up the line, we just don’t see it,” one senior intelligence official said.

As a young fellow I worked for the NSA's Army arm during the Viet Nam war. Without saying any more let me tell you that we knew everything the enemy was communicating - everything. Today, considering the advances in electronics and with the NSA operating freely inside our country with the apparent capability to monitor and evaluate millions and millions of communications continuously the statement quoted above seems ludicrous. "We just don't see it" indeed .....

We are being bullshitted folks, pure and simple bullshit.

that it is portrayed as by the US. gov't and corporate media--as operating in 60 countries at the direction of those 2 men--does not exist.

Al-quaeda may be a term of our own invention--in fact we know that it is a term of Western invention--that we apply to mostly unconnected, uncoordinated small networks of Islamist terrorists. It serves to put a face, an impressive and terrifying face, on an otherwise unimpressive faceless rabble. Specifically the way it serves is that it serves to terrorize Western populations and mobilize them to unquestioning action under the goad of their increasingly authoritarian governments. We don't have the Al-Quaeda communications "up-the-line" to Al-Quaeda HQ because they don't send communications up a line that doesn't exist to a non-existent leadership. We just say they do. Since the elites of U.S., Britain and others have profited immensely in the last 5 and half years by maintaining the idea of pervasive coordinated arch-terrorist network, the assumption operating in and ruling over our intelligence community and the public pronouncements of our gov'ts is that those unfound communications exist must somewhere, that they do go on somehow, but we can't reliably tap into them yet. This is reminiscent of the elusive Iraqi WMD facilities that had to exist underground, or on wheels disguised as campers or mobile homes, since they could not be seen to exist in satellite photography. Even further back, some of the same people who inflicted the idea of necessarily invisible Iraq WMD facilities on the American people also deluded them with the idea that the Soviet Union must have had a more sophisticated means of detecting submarine movement than we had developed, since no evidence could be found of a Soviet acoustic detection network corresponding to ours. In both the Iraq case and the Soviet case the assumption was incorrect and implausible, but clung to for reasons that had nothing to do with the likelihood or unlikelihood of the claim. The false assumptions were necessary as a premise to an aggressive and expansionist policy. The same is probably true of current fantasies about "Al-Quaeda".

If you assume that anything that you say on a radio / telephone will be caught by the NSA, then you use a system that they can not tap. Messagers come to mind first. IMHO this may be the reason we have not heard much about bin forgotten and his group.

Hand delivered through the network. Send ten or twenty by various routes and something is bound to get through.

And someone would sell out as well. I'd buy the idea that they were using passenger pigeons before I'd accept the idea that it was multiple messages being run by multiple couriers overland or by air.