The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Blair-Glass ‘Sleeper Cell’ — British Tabloid Fabricates a Phony Scoop

Posted on | April 21, 2013 | 43 Comments

Here’s a quote from the New York Times, about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s trip to Russia last year:

Kevin Brock, a former senior FBI and counterterrorism official, said, “It’s a key thread for investigators and the intelligence community to pull on.”

On the top of Memeorandum last night was this headline from the British tabloid, the Mirror:

Boston bombers: FBI hunting
12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked
to brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

Somebody sent that story to me and so I looked at it. After reading the wild-ass quotes from a “source close to the investigation” and finding nothing else in the story to back up that claim, I  noticed something else in the Mirror story:

Yesterday senior FBI counter-terrorism official Kevin Brock said: “It’s a key thread for investigators.”

Whoa! You’ve got a “source close to the investigation” feeding you this big exclusive about a “sleeper cell” — a claim that no other news organization has been able to verify, I hasten to point out — and yet you also resort to cribbing quotes from the New York Times, while failing to note Brock’s status as a “former” FBI official? Does anyone else detect the fragrance of bovine excrement here?

So I e-mailed my friend:

It’s important to evaluate stories like this on the basis of sourcing and how it’s put together: Notice that the Mirror leads with an outrageous headline claim — decidedly important, if true — about this alleged “sleeper cell,” but that this is based on a single “source close to the investigation” who is never even characterized: DOJ? CIA? NSA? Some cop eating donuts?
We have nothing in the description of the quoted source that would allow us to evaluate the credibility of the outrageous claim, nor does there seem to have been any effort to verify this claim with any official source. There isn’t even so much as a “no comment” from a named source. Instead, after leading with this seemingly far-fetched “sleeper cell” claim based on a blind-quoted source, the Mirror then goes on to tell the reader about (not-really-related) details that could have been — and may actually have been — culled from the morning newspapers and TV coverage.
And the quote from Kevin Brock, FBI counter-terrorism official? Cribbed from the New York Times!
This isn’t journalism, it’s complete bullshit. If I were the editor of a newspaper whose reporter turned in a story like this, I’d fire any son of a bitch who let it get into print. Hell, when I was working for the Washington Times, I’d have gotten my head bitten off by Geoff Etnyre if I’d let a mess like this get as far as the copy desk.
There are two bylines on this story. I checked to make sure it wasn’t co-written by Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass.

This isn’t even good phony journalism — Blair and Glass actually managed to get away with their fraudulent impostures for a while, but this exercise in dishonesty is apparent at first glance.

There is too much good reporting about this story — like this excellent recap of the investigation by the Washington Post — to waste time on bogus garbage about a “sleeper cell.” Want something really interesting? Check out Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Amazon Wish List.

UPDATE: To clarify — as there seems to be some confusion among commenters here and in the Twitter reaction — what I’m disputing is the Mirror‘s “source” quoted here:

The FBI was last night hunting a 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked to the Boston marathon bomb brothers. . . .
A source close to the investigation said: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google.
“They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come.”

That last sentence in particular reeks of rancid bullshit. I am not for a moment discounting the likelihood that the Brothers Tsarnaev had accomplices, or that Tamerlan’s trip to Russia was connected to this attack, which may indeed be part of a larger conspiracy.

What I am saying is that there is no way on God’s green earth that two reporters for a British tabloid could have a “source close to the investigation” who could describe with such specificity a “12-strong terrorist ‘sleeper cell,'” and yet none of the national-security reporters in America — people who regularly cover this beat and have relationships of trust with top sources — could match that scoop.

Even if someone “close to the investigation” actually gave those quotes to the Mirror reporters, which I am inclined to doubt, that’s not the kind of exclusive you run as a headline — not on a story this important — without getting some corroboration from other officials, and at least a “did not return calls seeking comment” from the responsible agencies. This story presents no hint that the Mirror reporters even tried to corroborate their lead.

So I’m calling bullshit.

 


Category: Journalism, Terrorism

Fractious Methodist Jihadists Raging Against. . .Dryer Lint

Posted on | April 21, 2013 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

Wombat is on the prowl, and, as he does once or twice a year, he asked me to return to the FMJRA beat. Been a long time since I rocked and rolled, and I really should do some maintenance on the piece that generates this report. Lots of Twitter & Facebook links these days. You should follow/like all of the social media friends of this blog below.

Looking over the news, its West, TX, Boston, and Planned Parenthood’s own Kurt Gosnell dominating the news. Three variations on the theme of death. In protest for a week of foul news, I’m planning a party for next Saturday-ish. The details will be made known as the moment approaches. The location will be Stacy McCain’s timeline on Twitter. So stand by.

Meanwhile, the excellent Wombat will be back to doing the chores next week.

Stop the Killing. Stop the Crying.

Anybody Else Starting to Suspect @AmandaMarcotte Eats Dead Babies?

FMJRA 2.0: Sunday Morning Edition

MSNBC: The Network America Turns to for Irresponsible Speculation About News

GO, NICK SEARCY, GO!

Teenage Girls on Trial in Canada for Running Prostitution Ring

How the Left’s Online Meme Machine Helped Create a Murder Myth in Texas

The Hope Industry

When You Report Breaking News, Be Like Joe Friday: ‘Just the Facts, Ma’am’

Terrorism, Journalism and Other Crimes of ‘Workplace-Related Violence’

Shorter @DylanByers: ‘Hurry Up, FBI, So We Can Start the Media Blame Game!’

LIVE AT FIVENINE: 04.17.13

Rule 5 Wednesday: Once More Into The Bleach

Pressure Cooker: In Hunt for Bombing Suspects, Speculation Runs Rampant

BREAKING: Cable TV News Airheads Screwed Up a Major Story, Again

LIVE AT FIVE: 04.18.13

TV Won’t Show You the Pictures, But the Reddit/4Chan Guys Have Apparently ID’d the Boston Marathon Bombing Suspects

Joe Biden Invents Phony Gun Statistics — Because SHUT UP HATERS, That’s Why!

At a Loss for Words Now

Category: FMJRA Award

EVIL SHALL NOT PROSPER

Posted on | April 21, 2013 | 19 Comments

Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

“Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser recently admitted in a complaint to my office that he introduced [Nadia] Naffe to attorney Jay Leiderman . . .
“In the same document, Rauhauser declared that if Naffe is successful, he believes it will put an end to my career as a Deputy D.A.”
— Patrick “Patterico” Frey, Oct. 4, 2012


This is indeed very happy news, my friends:

Ken and I in particular got to face, not just criticism, but “vapid and dishonest partisan hacks” who criticized both of us for standing up for free speech — including “the greasy, demi-literate, demented Hutt who wrote an extended quasi-sexual fantasy about a mob murdering Patrick and me.”
Hi, Bill Schmalfeldt! I understand you were curious about the result of this case. I’m happy to be sharing that with you! And, your sick, twisted fantasies notwithstanding, nobody has yet beaten me or Ken with baseball bats or tire irons. No group of men has thrown us in front of a moving truck as part of a conspiracy to cause our deaths.

Now, it was actually Ken at Popehat who described Bill Schmalfeldt as a “demented Hutt,” but I read it at Patterico‘s so . . .

Why is this such happy news? Because this nuisance suit against Patterico was self-evidently part of a deliberate vendetta against one of Brett Kimberlin’s chosen targets, an attempt to silence Patterico and intimidate others, as I explained in October:

I can’t imagine any court finding Patterico guilty of anything, but this lawsuit is just another typical product of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser “accuse the accusers” strategy. Once they target someone, the accusations proliferate endlessly as part of an orchestrated effort to discredit anyone who might accuse them of wrongdoing.

Off the top of my head, I could name a half-dozen people who have been targeted in this manner by either Kimberlin or Rauhauser or the various sociopathic trolls in their online mob. This is not merely harassment and cyberstalking — although it is that — but it is in fact political terrorism, and this lawfare harassment of Patrick Frey was an effort to silence him for having said so:

Keep in mind that Rauhauser, by inciting Nadia Naffe’s lawsuit against Patterico, has obligated Patterico to avoid writing about this subject on advice of counsel . . .

Well, how’s that working out for you, Neal Rauhauser? Patterico promises to tell the truth — the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God — on Monday. Meanwhile, go hit Patterico’s tip jar, and encourage him to plunge the knife of truth as deep as it will go.

Evil shall not prosper, nor will the wicked triumph. Selah.

 

Category: Bill Schmalfeldt, Patterico, The Kimberlin Files

A Picture That Will Warm Your Heart

Posted on | April 20, 2013 | 20 Comments

What a week, huh? The most outrageous image of the week — and it still makes me angry just to think about it — was the picture of “Suspect Number Two” (19-year-old Dzhokar Tsarnaev) placing his backpack bomb next to 8-year-old Martin Richard.

But not every photo to come out of this week’s Boston Marathon bombing crisis was hateful. Are you ready for your “awwww” moment?

CLICK THIS LINK NOW. (Trust me, this is going viral and will be on your wife’s Facebook page by noon Monday at the latest.)

Category: Terrorism

The #BlockedByDavidSirota Club: Membership Is Growing Rapidly!

Posted on | April 20, 2013 | 40 Comments

“Philadelphia mayoral candidate Dwight Evans yesterday accepted the resignation of his campaign manager and fired the deputy manager after learning that the deputy was linked to a bogus Web site apparently intended to hurt a rival candidate.
“Evans, a state representative from West Oak Lane, denounced the phony Web page as an example of ‘dirty tricks’ . . .
“[Evans] apologized to the target of the ruse, John White Jr., a rival for the Democratic nomination for mayor.”
“Evans said yesterday he had learned that his deputy campaign manager, David J. Sirota, of Huntingdon Valley, was ‘associated’ with the person who registered the site . . .”
— Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 27, 1999

In a comment on my post this morning about the capture of the Boston bomber — “We Got Him” — Leather Penguin mentioned that Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom “was smacking the ever-loving crap outta Sirota yesterday.” Investigating, I then discovered that David Sirota had blocked Goldstein on Twitter.

As everyone with Internet access almost certainly knows by now, David Sirota won the coveted 2013 “Douchebag of the Year” prize — it was awarded early this year, because the prize committee realized no one else could hope to compete — after writing a Salon column entitled, “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” (Here are safe links to Robert Spencer’s reaction at Jihad Watch, and Mark Steyn’s reaction at National Review, if you don’t want to give traffic to Salon.)

We know what kind of person David Sirota is: A man whose career as a partisan political hack included getting fired for his involvement in dishonest dirty tricks aimed at a Democrat rival, a cruel and deliberate smear campaign intended to inflame racial animosity.

An infamous liar undeserving of trust, Sirota’s preferred method of “argument” is to defame people he hates — see his notorious 2011 column, “Why Many Evangelical Christians Are More ‘Un-American’ Than US Muslims” — and then to accuse them of being either too stupid or too cowardly to engage his “arguments.” Watch this four-minute clip in which Sirota, who gives every appearance of being in the grip of a bizarre psychiatric disorder, calls KOA radio host Mike Rosen a “motherf–ker” and repeatedly hectors Rosen with demands to “answer the question,” which Rosen is certainly willing and able to do, if only Sirota would stop his angry interruptions:

No honest person could admire or respect a hateful bullying liar like David Sirota. His anti-social behavior on Twitter and elsewhere is typical of Our Moral and Intellectual Superiors™ — mistaking their leftist ideology for virtue, they bask in their narcissistic self-admiration while lashing out at scapegoats onto whom they externalize blame.

Facts do not confirm their worldview, so they find themselves compelled to lie. Dishonesty becomes habitual — indeed, lying becomes integral to their identity –and when called out on their lies, they attempt to silence truth-tellers by accusing them of “hate.”

Every decent human being abhors the liar David Sirota. Many covet the prestige of being blocked by him, so do this:

  1. Send a Twitter message addressed to @DavidSirota;
  2. Include some facts about the Islamic terror attack in Boston (because David Sirota hates facts); and
  3. Include the #BlockedByDavidSirota hashtag.

He can’t block the entire Internet, although he seems determined to try.

UPDATE: Profiles in Douchebag Courage:

 

Category: Intellectuals, Rule 4

‘We Got Him’

Posted on | April 20, 2013 | 36 Comments

“We got him” — that’s what they told Boston Mayor Thomas Menino after Dzhokar Tsarnaev was apprehended — alive — Friday night, ending a weeklong manhunt that those of us who followed it are unlikely ever to forget. It was like live-blogging a Die Hard sequel. The minute you thought to yourself, “Well, it can’t get any crazier than this,” it did, but the whole thing was crazy from the very beginning.

Chechen Islamic terrorists bomb the Boston Marathon.

Re-read that sentence. It makes no sense at all.

If you had proposed that as the plot of a novel before Monday, any publisher would have laughed you out of his office: “Chechens? What the hell is a Chechen? And why the hell would these Chechens want to bomb the Boston Marathon?” But . . . they did, didn’t they?

Yeah, two Chechen brothers decided that they’d build bombs out of pressure cookers, packing them with ball bearings as shrapnel to blow people’s legs off. Then these crafty jihadists, who had pulled off the biggest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, implemented their clever escape plan . . . Oh, wait.

They had no clever escape plan. Given a three-day head start, by which time they could have been halfway across the globe, instead the Brothers Tsarnaev fled no further than the suburbs of Boston. As late as Wednesday, “Suspect Number Two” was still hanging out at college, working out in the gym. It wasn’t until after their photos were shown to the world at a press conference that the Brothers Tsarnaev decided to make their move, which involved shooting a campus cop at MIT, then carjacking a Mercedes SUV for a car chase during which they threw bombs out the window at pursuing cops.

Brilliant plan, “Suspect Number One.”

The cops shut down the entire city of Boston — no buses or trains Friday — and told people to stay indoors. Then the cops held a press conference to say, “Go back to your normal lives.” An hour later, “shots fired” and we had a televised standoff that finally ended with “Suspect Number Two” being arrested on a boat in the backyard of a house at 67 Franklin Street, Watertown, which briefly became the world’s most famous address. (Dzhokhar is now being treated at Beth Israel Medical Center, because God has a sense of irony.)

And in that moment of triumph and relief, with one suspect dead and the other in custody, the first instinct of liberals was to wonder if the FBI had read Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his rights.

Meanwhile, the liberals who spent four days hoping and praying and predicting that this heinous atrocity was perpetrated by right-wingers are now busy telling us that we shouldn’t focus on the Islamic beliefs of these Chechen terrorists — disciples of radical imam Feiz Mohammad — or the fact that these guys were immigrants.

Our Moral and Intellectual Superiors are now lecturing us that it’s wrong to speculate about motives.

Maybe I’ll write some more later about these ridiculous douchebags, but for right now, I’m just incredibly tired and grateful that Suspect Number One is a cold heap of decaying flesh and Suspect Number Two is going to face justice for what he did.

We know what he did. And we don’t need any liberal sermons about the need to “respect a basic presumption of innocence.”

What part of “fuck you, David Sirota” is so hard to understand?

 

 

 

PREVIOUSLY:

 


Category: Terrorism

‘We’re Halfway There’

Posted on | April 19, 2013 | 21 Comments

Dan Riehl has the gruesome photo and quotes the Boston Globe:

The image of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, dead and naked on a slab, snapped by an unknown person, was emailed repeatedly by law enforcement officers Friday.
“Suspect 1” was written above the gruesome picture. . . .
“Mission accomplished. We’re halfway there. Justice is served.”

It’s been kind of busy the past 24 hours at Viral Read:

You can click here to follow continuing developments at ViralRead. Sorry for the paucity of blog commentary, but when big news is breaking, covering it is my job. The patience of readers is appreciated, as are your continuing contributions to the Shoe Leather Fund.

 

 


Category: Terrorism

At a Loss for Words Now

Posted on | April 19, 2013 | 27 Comments

Busy day Thursday, for obvious reasons — the press conference, the official suspect photos — and a couple late developments I’ve got to catch up with before I can go to bed. Dan Riehl may have a hot scoop here that I’m not willing to follow now, but I’ll certainly keep watching.

Twice, I tried to compose posts here Thursday, but interruptions kept happening, and then I saw something that really got to me.

That’s evil. Just pure,  cold evil.

UPDATE: Just about the time I planned to go to bed, a shooting near MIT turned into a police standoff near Watertown, Mass., and now it’s being reported that the suspects have been identified and were the subjects of all this police action. It’s now past 4 a.m., and I’m halfway through a pot of coffee, 20 hours into the day.

“Suspect Number Two” is reportedly still at large.

He will eventually burn in hell.

UPDATE: Suspects are reportedly brothers from war-torn Russian province of Chechnya. Well, one of the brothers is from Chenya, the other was — Suspect Number One is dead, and Suspect Number Two is a fugitive.

 

Category: Terrorism
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