Court Rejects Release of OBL Death Photos

U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg yesterday rejected a suit filed by Judicial Watch seeking  release of the “death photographs” of Osama bin Laden under the Freedom of Information Act. The rejection was so total that even the date which the photographs were classified can be withheld from disclosure. In passing judgment, however, Boasberg did note that,

As a preliminary matter, Judicial Watch is correct that the CIA’s declarations are not a model of transparency.

By yesterday afternoon, Judicial Watch had filed a notice of appeal. 

Boasberg’s opinion in full: 

It’s quite astounding that documents as important as these went missing and the FBI says, ‘Well, they’re gone.’ This is a matter of significant public interest.
Federal District Court Judge Clark Waddoups responded on Wednesday to the FBI’s claim that unreleased surveillance video tapes from the Murrah Federal Building taken in the days and hours before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing have vanished. 
Report: Vice-President Biden was Osama bin Laden’s Secret Weapon The Washington Post today reported on a high-level Al Qaeda plan to assassinate Barack Obama and Gen. David Petraeus by downing Air Force One through some undetailed mechanism. The goal, according to the plan, would be to elevate gaffe-prone Joe Biden to the presidency. Osama bin Laden believed the bumbling former bankruptcy lawyer would inadvertently destroy the United States if left in charge. “Biden is totally unprepared for that post [the presidency], which will lead the U.S. into a crisis,” Bin Laden is reported to have written to senior advisor Atiya Abd al-Rahman. 
Pop-upView Separately

Report: Vice-President Biden was Osama bin Laden’s Secret Weapon

The Washington Post today reported on a high-level Al Qaeda plan to assassinate Barack Obama and Gen. David Petraeus by downing Air Force One through some undetailed mechanism. The goal, according to the plan, would be to elevate gaffe-prone Joe Biden to the presidency. Osama bin Laden believed the bumbling former bankruptcy lawyer would inadvertently destroy the United States if left in charge.

“Biden is totally unprepared for that post [the presidency], which will lead the U.S. into a crisis,” Bin Laden is reported to have written to senior advisor Atiya Abd al-Rahman. 

Stratfor analysts did not believe that Osama bin Laden was buried at sea, according to Stratfor emails. At 5:26 a.m. on May 2 … Stratfor CEO George Friedman sent an email with the subject “[alpha] OBL” that said: “Reportedly, we took the body with us. Thank goodness.” Fred Burton, Stratfor’s vice president for intelligence, followed that up at 5:51 a.m. with an email titled “[alpha] Body bound for Dover, DE on CIA plane.
businessinsider.com

Sydney Hilton Bombing, 1978

Today, February 13, marks the anniversary of the 1978 Sydney hotel bombing. The unsolved blast, at a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Goverment, killed three and wounded eleven when a trash bin bomb detonated after being emptied into a garbage truck. 

“Conspiracy” looks at the lingering questions left by the bombing. For instance, police disposed of bomb fragments immediately after the attack at an unrecorded location, Australian Army bomb-sniffing dog teams were called off from securing the Hilton for reasons unexplained and at least one Sydney police detective made public claims of a cover-up. A 1991 resolution of the New South Wales parliament requesting a new inquiry into the attack was not acted upon by the Australian federal government.

a new documentary purports to reveal a multi-layered cover-up in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City

[The Vice-President of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran] Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani told a news conference on the sidelines of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s General Assembly in Vienna how British spies shadowed him around the world to collect information prior to a failed assassination attempt against him last year. Unidentified terrorists detonated bombs attached to the cars of university professors Majid Shahriari and Abbasi-Davani on 29 November 2010.
Press TV
Who Blew-Up Swissair 111? Canadian official state media, the CBC, reports that “an investigator looking into the crash of Swissair Flight 111 near Peggys Cove, N.S., says he was prevented by senior RCMP and aviation safety officials from pursuing his theory that an incendiary device might have been the cause.” The Swiss MD-11 crashed into the water off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1998, killing all 229 passengers, including members of the Iranian and Saudi royal families, and several prominent United Nations and World Health Organization officials. Both flight data recorders failed six minutes before the crash leaving no record of the aircraft’s final minutes. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada ruled the cause of the crash as fire resulting from a malfunction in the aircraft’s in-flight entertainment system. Events of September 11, 2001 hurt Swissair’s finances and it shuttered operations, and auctioned company assets, six months later.
View Separately

Who Blew-Up Swissair 111?

Canadian official state media, the CBC, reports that “an investigator looking into the crash of Swissair Flight 111 near Peggys Cove, N.S., says he was prevented by senior RCMP and aviation safety officials from pursuing his theory that an incendiary device might have been the cause.”

The Swiss MD-11 crashed into the water off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1998, killing all 229 passengers, including members of the Iranian and Saudi royal families, and several prominent United Nations and World Health Organization officials. Both flight data recorders failed six minutes before the crash leaving no record of the aircraft’s final minutes. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada ruled the cause of the crash as fire resulting from a malfunction in the aircraft’s in-flight entertainment system.

Events of September 11, 2001 hurt Swissair’s finances and it shuttered operations, and auctioned company assets, six months later.

A paper by Dr. Jenna Jordan, presented at the 2010 meeting of the International Studies Association, looks at the potential for collapse of a non-state military group following elimination of the group’s leadership by police or military action. In general, Jordan’s survey finds, the older a group is the less likely it is to collapse following a decapitation strike. Additionally, religiously motivated groups are highly resistant to attacks on their leadership, while separatist and ideologically-motivated organizations are easier to destabilize through decapitation. 
Pop-upView Separately

A paper by Dr. Jenna Jordan, presented at the 2010 meeting of the International Studies Association, looks at the potential for collapse of a non-state military group following elimination of the group’s leadership by police or military action. In general, Jordan’s survey finds, the older a group is the less likely it is to collapse following a decapitation strike. Additionally, religiously motivated groups are highly resistant to attacks on their leadership, while separatist and ideologically-motivated organizations are easier to destabilize through decapitation. 

In their 2010 paper Military Interventions and Transnational Terrorism: An Intense Relationship Drs. Seung-Whan Choi and Matthew Powers of the University of Illinois used negative binomial regression of data from 165 countries covering the time period 1968 to 2005 to predict the probability of increases in terrorism following a foreign military intervention. They discovered that increases in international terrorism resulting from such actions generally outweigh any benefit realized by the intervention itself, however, if intervention is unavoidable it should be done with overwhelming force.  On the Choi-Powers scale the current Libya bombardment would be categorized as a Small-Medium intervention, the type statistically most likely to be followed by an increase in international terrorism in the months or years following conclusion.
Pop-upView Separately

In their 2010 paper Military Interventions and Transnational Terrorism: An Intense Relationship Drs. Seung-Whan Choi and Matthew Powers of the University of Illinois used negative binomial regression of data from 165 countries covering the time period 1968 to 2005 to predict the probability of increases in terrorism following a foreign military intervention. They discovered that increases in international terrorism resulting from such actions generally outweigh any benefit realized by the intervention itself, however, if intervention is unavoidable it should be done with overwhelming force. 

On the Choi-Powers scale the current Libya bombardment would be categorized as a Small-Medium intervention, the type statistically most likely to be followed by an increase in international terrorism in the months or years following conclusion.