From the Muffin Utility Kitchen . . .

ACCORDING TO GIZMODO, MI6 hacked into an Al Qaeda website, and replaced bomb-making recipes for cupcake recipes. What about the nut allergies? Have we engaged in biological warfare? According to Kat Hannaford,

Famed British intelligence agency MI6 hacked the first English-language Jihadist online magazine, Inspire, last year but their cheeky content-swapping mission has only just been made public now. And thank goodness.

As the story goes, they swapped potentially-destructive bomb-making tutorials with jumbled-up code for the Ellen DeGeneres talkshow website, which contained cupcake recipes from Main Street Cupcakes in Hudson, Ohio. Recipes for delicious-sounding mojito and rocky road cupcakes, which contained the caveat "warning: sugar rush ahead!"

Maybe Hortons can introduce new camel-flavor dognutz in Kandahar, too.

Al-Qaeda supporters endorse McCain!

"Impetuous" McCain! :

"One message, posted on the extremist website al-Hesbah — which is closely linked to al-Qaeda — said that if the terror group wants to exhaust the US economically and military, then victory for the “impetuous” Republican candidate would benefit them because Mr McCain would continue “the failing march of his predecessor” President Bush."

And the last minute endorsements are just rolling in for McCain now...

The Pornography of Power

Journalist Robert Scheer on "The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America"

From a rough transcript of an interview on Democracy Now :

AMY GOODMAN: The Pornography of Power—why pornography?

ROBERT SCHEER: Because it’s not the real thing. It’s a trick. It’s like—I liken it to a lap dance. You know, you’re promising something that doesn’t exist. They’re promising security. These defense contractors, lobbyists, politicians, they pretend they’re dealing with real issues in the world, and they’re not. They’re just getting your money, and they’re deceiving you."

"I say, we had a situation where Bush vetoed an extension of child healthcare that would have involved $7 billion, OK? That’s two subs that we don’t need that are built every year. Alright? We have the F-35, an airplane that’s a $300 billion program. Why do we need new planes? The F-22, a $65 billion program. So we are wasting trillions of dollars on this old-fashioned defense budget that benefits Boeing, benefits Lockheed. Everyone knows it’s a scam. Everyone knows there is no military function for this, there’s no national security. And what happened is they got a license to steal. 9/11 was their license to steal."

"The irony now is that when these defense hawks—when they challenge my book and they say, "Well, of course, we don’t need these submarines to fight al-Qaeda. They don’t even have a rowboat. And of course we don’t need, you, now, new stealth bombers to fight al-Qaeda. But there’s the China menace."

The irony is here, China is financing our arms development. They are charging us interest to lend us money to build weapons ostensibly to attack them, and they’re laughing up their sleeve. They know this is a joke."

"Imperialism doesn’t pay. You know, here in California, I’m paying, what, $4.40 for gas, and we have seized the second-biggest pool of oil in the world? And we’re now paying—you know, the price of oil has gone up six-fold since George Bush has been president, and you want to tell me imperialism pays?

So I think the failure of the neoconservatives really is the failure of the imperial model. The Germans learned that. The French learned it, the English. Everybody in the world knows old-fashioned imperialism does not pay for the average person. It pays for Halliburton. It pays for, you know, Exxon. But it doesn’t pay for the taxpayer."

So who exactly benefits from Bhutto's assassination. A lot of people from the look of it.

Newshoggers is keeping up with information surrounding the Bhutto assassination. It is worth a check back from time to time, including something of a friendly debate going on between Cernig and Shamanic as to the possible involvement of Pervez Musharraf.

Two points of interest here. Insiders close to Bhutto are suggesting that Musharraf was either directly or indirectly involved.

A longtime adviser and close friend of assassinated Pakistani ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto places blame for Bhutto's death squarely on the shoulders of U.S.-supported dictator Pervez Musharraf.

After an October attack on Bhutto's life in Karachi, the ex-prime minister warned "certain individuals in the security establishment [about the threat] and nothing was done," says Husain Haqqani, a confidante of Bhutto's for decades. "There is only one possibility: the security establishment and Musharraf are complicit, either by negligence or design. That is the most important thing. She's not the first political leader killed, since Musharraf took power, by the security forces."

Haqqani notes that Bhutto died of a gunshot wound to the neck. "It's like a hit, not a regular suicide bombing," he says. "It's quite clear that someone who considers himself Pakistan's Godfather has a very different attitude toward human life than you and I do."

The thing is, a lot of political opposition in Pakistan has been eliminated through either execution or "mysterious" deaths. Knocking off the opposition is not uncommon.

However, now we have al-Qaeda claiming responsibility.

While al Qaeda is considered by the U.S. to be a likely suspect in the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Banazir Bhutto, U.S. intelligence officials say they cannot confirm an initial claim of responsibility for the attack, supposedly from an al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan.

An obscure Italian Web site said Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, al Qaeda's commander in Afghanistan, told its reporter in a phone call, "We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahedeen."

It said the decision to assassinate Bhutto was made by al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al Zawahri in October. Before joining Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, Zawahri was imprisoned in Egypt for his role in the assassination of then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

That will certainly get some quarters all riled and jumping in with pointing fingers, but there is something else.

U.S. officials monitoring Internet chat rooms known to be used by Islamic militants say several claims of responsibility have been posted, although such postings are notoriously unreliable.

Which makes the al-Qaeda claim a little less significant but not fully discountable.

One thing is slightly puzzling. Given the tenuous situation in Pakistan over the past few months, and given the October attempt on Bhutto's life, for which al Qaeda claimed credit, it would seem that US intelligence would be paying close attention to any activity involving extremist groups.

I'll go one further. It is not in the interest of the Bush administration not to have had al Qaeda carry this assassination off. Yet, US intelligence is issuing a very cautious "maybe" but "we can't confirm it".

There are two points that arise from that.

The US intelligence community is hoisting a middle finger to Cheney once again. As they did with the NIE on Iran, they are steadfastly maintaining their independence by not immediately giving Cheney the words he would like to hear. Cheney is a solid Musharraf supporter. By not immediately confirming al Qaeda's claim, Musharraf lives under a veil of suspicion.

The second point is that there is obvious skepticism among intelligence analysts. Even if al Qaeda's claim is genuine, there is also the possibility of conspiratorial involvement of other parties, particularly the ISI. Musharraf may or may not have had direct involvement, but given the renewed independence of US intelligence agencies and their recent working out from under the thumb of Dick Cheney, they're not going to be pressured into any easy answer. If they believed al Qaeda's claim they could easily have come out and confirmed it. This is only speculation but what's going on now suggests they have different information.

The move to watch is whether Musharraf cancels elections.

al Qaeda on the rise

On March 13, 2002 George W. Bush was asked, roughly, "Where is Osama bin Laden?" This was his answer:

Deep in my heart I know the man is on the run, if he's alive at all. Who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not; we haven't heard from him in a long time. And the idea of focusing on one person is -- really indicates to me people don't understand the scope of the mission.

Terror is bigger than one person. And he's just -- he's a person who's now been marginalized. His network, his host government has been destroyed. He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and met his match. He is -- as I mentioned in my speech, I do mention the fact that this is a fellow who is willing to commit youngsters to their death and he, himself, tries to hide -- if, in fact, he's hiding at all.

So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him

[...]

Well, as I say, we haven't heard much from him. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I -- I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him.

Just six months earlier Osama bin Laden was cearly identified as the leader of an organization which had perpetrated an act of unprecedented horror upon the United States killing 2,973 people in a matter of a few minutes. Osama bin Laden was definitely worth any effort to bring into custody and face an angry world.

Yet, in six months Osama bin Laden had fallen out of the sights of George Bush. The attention span of the President of the United States was so short that his concern for a mass murderer had waned. Instead, Bush started to march his country to new war, based on manufactured evidence, with Iraq. And, as his attention to the individual responsible for the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks evaporated, so too did his attention to Afghanistan and the place Osama was able to train his followers and from which to coordinate attacks. Bush declared a place and a leader which had not been involved in September 11th as the main enemy and the central front of his so-called War On Terror. His focus shifted to Iraq and he literally forgot about Osama bin Laden.

Now, almost predictably, al Qaeda is back. Far from the fractured, marginalized network of George Bush's imagination, al Qaeda is regaining strength and engaged in renewed training.

American officials said there was mounting evidence that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan. Until recently, the Bush administration had described Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri as detached from their followers and cut off from operational control of Al Qaeda.

The United States has also identified several new Qaeda compounds in North Waziristan, including one that officials said might be training operatives for strikes against targets beyond Afghanistan.

The former head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA, Michael Scheuer provided an analysis that seems to verify what the anonymous intelligence types provided the New York Times on MSNBC's Countdown. For an excerpted transcript, Jill has the highlights and a strong comment:

I hope Americans will think back on how George W. Bush almost completely abandoned the effort to fight al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, because instead of going to counseling for his father issues like normal people, he had to invade a country that was no threat to us, had nothing to do with September 11, and certainly had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.

Exactly.

And you can bet that the next bit of sewage to rise out of the ranks of the right-wing noise machine will be something along the lines of the Republicans are the only US party with the cajones to deal with this rising threat.

If that were true, however, al Qaeda would be a defunct body.

Al Qaeda survives because Bush let it survive. It grew stronger because his rubber-stamp congress endorsed every thoughless move Bush made. It may well be within reach of formulating another devastating attack because Bush and his cargo culture found al Qaeda an inconvenient barrier to an agenda from which they would not vary. They wanted to go into Iraq, they were going to go into Iraq and Iraq is where they ended up. The Republicans are not the capable military crew they purport to be. They talk a good story but when the truth of their accomplishments are analyzed they emerge as completely incompetent. In terms of foreign policy and global strategy, nobody has produced worse results than Bush and flock of war-bangers who supported him. They're good at beating people up, but they don't have the smarts to actually win a fight.

Osama, and the members of his power structure, must have praised Allah a thousand times for their good luck. He got two hits with one swing. Not only was Bush unable to remain focused on his real enemy, he got his military machine bogged down in a country which was once hostile to him. They had but to feed the fires of resistance to keep the US tied down and occupied. In Afghanistan, it was a simple matter of sending sporadic waves of attacks in from the safe haven of North Waziristan to keep NATO and US troops engaged.

What does this mean for NATO troops in Afghanistan? More of the same. As many as NATO think they can eliminate, al Qaeda, and their client, the Taliban, will just send more. They will make an extra effort to keep western forces confused and constantly on the alert. By doing so it causes the governments who sent those troops to look in the wrong direction.

If al Qaeda is successful, if they manage to mount an attack of some significance in North America, it will be because they were allowed to get away with it. It will be because, unable to persevere and deal with each problem to its conclusion, the Bush administration allowed itself, lacking intelligence and discipline, to become distracted. It's happening again as Bush increases his rhetoric and attempts to generate a casus belli for attacking Iran. Osama must be his most fervent cheerleader.

If al Qaeda manages to attack North America again there will be only one group to blame. The neo-cons and the warped ideology that oozes from the dungeons of their imperial citadels.

If it happens again, it will be Bush's fault.

We have a solution to this heinous problem...

Which we created!

From ABC News:

Mimicking the hijackers who executed the Sept. 11 attacks, insurgents reportedly tied to al Qaeda in Iraq considered using student visas to slip terrorists into the United States to orchestrate a new attack on American soil.

Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Yes... and the usual suspects are busy puckering their assholes, sucking air and pointing at the sky. Terraists!!!

What ABC fails to mention is that al Qaeda did not exist in Iraq before March 20th, 2003. They simply weren't there.

So what else was ABC up to today? Well, how about a little mixing of drama and politics. In an attempt to make life imitate art, ABC posed a question and attracted an opinion piece from Hugh "There's no silicon in my man-breasts" Hewitt on whether FOX television's "24" went too far in depicting a scenario during which Los Angeles gets nuked. So, under which particular heading did ABC lodge this particular question and answer about a television drama, all of which is pure Hollywood fantasy?

Under ABC News POLITICS, of course. Don't worry... I'm confident CNN will come around and find a spot for American Idol in the appropriate broadcast spot.

Wow... and just one day before the smirking little prick stands before a hostile congress and presents his State Of The Onion Union address.

Speaking of which... it looks like George has fallen so far that he's going to copy his Canadian counterparts. When times are tough and friends are few, green's the new winning hue!

President Bush's staff promise that his pronouncements tonight on energy and climate will "knock your socks off" and score headlines "above the fold."

Listen for soaring new goals for biofuels like ethanol, a plea for more presidential power to boost vehicle fuel economy and perhaps a more concrete acknowledgement of global warming.

Woo... heavy stuff. Especially since...

President Bush ruled out mandatory reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions in 2001, favoring encouragement of voluntary cuts and investment in low-carbon technologies.

Al Qaeda in Iraq? Yessir! You brought them there; don't expect them to be tame. Kind of reminds me of something I saw somewhere.

ABC is worried whether "24" has gone too far. Nah! Amateur production compared to what the Brits put out 22 years ago. Now that was nasty bit of drama and it didn't even get off the entertainment pages.

And, as for Georgie Junior suddenly going green, well, isn't it amazing how, when the neo-cons, no matter what nationality, suddenly discover that the majority of the population dislike them, they run and hug a tree.

It's all quite stunning really.