Terrorism

Tagging for Freedom

by

This little Israeli prank in Iran reminded me of a conversation I had with my son about North Korea.

After the recent artillery attack against South Korea, my son asked why we just didn’t hammer them in response. I explained that (1) the North Koreans had most of Seoul under heavy artillery threat and (2) they were absolutely insane. A serious military attack might cause a wildly disproportionate retaliation that could cause the deaths of thousands of South Koreans.

I told him that I was always myself in favor of psyops. These types of regimes persist because they create a mythology of omniscience and omnipotence within their own population. Undermining that mythology can cause the state to collapse.

The North Koreans have this giant statue of the glorious leader in downtown Pyongyang. I’ve always thought that shooting a cruise missile right into the crotch of the statue would undermining the mythology and send a pointed message. However, even that might provoke a violent response. Moreover, the North Koreans quite clearly use external threats to justify their oppressive state to their own population. Attacking them violently might reinforce, instead of undermine, the mythology.

My son thought a moment and came up with a better idea: tagging, i.e., graffiti.

Read more

Wikileaks and the Search for a Cryptographic Mythology

by

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

Jean Rosenfeld of the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion just posted a comment on an earlier Zenpundit post of mine, opening up a topic which may interest some readers here: that of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s mythological associations.

1

Jean had earlier pointed me to Assange’s use of the name “Marutukku” to describe his encryption program, and a little fishing brought me to these two Assange-related documents:

One Man’s Search for a Cryptographic Mythology
Enuma Elish

2

I’d been idly wondering about cryptographic mythology myself, as it happens, nudged by vague memories of a cache of porno images tweaked by jihadists as encoding devices for steganography.

Steganography is the cryptographic or is it kabbalistic? — art devised by one Abbot Trithemius, whose 1518 Polygraphia is the first work on cryptography printed in Europe, and whose Steganographia was known in MS to such hermetic philosophers as Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno and John Dee. Jim Reeds captures the ambiguity of Trithemius’ work nicely in his paper, Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius’s Steganographia, when he asks:

Is it [the Steganographia] primarily an exposition of cryptographic techniques disguised as angel magic, or is it primarily a magic work disguised as cryptography?

Readers of Frances Yates and Ioan Couliano will be somewhat familiar with these matters.

And jihadist steganography? The technique itself is described in the al-Fajr Information Center’s Technical Mujahid magazine of Feb. 2007 according to a Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor piece, but the reports of actual jihadist use of the technique may turn out to be fabrications.

3

But it was Julian Assange‘s bliss we were trying to follow, right?

Assange sidekick Suelette Dreyfus wrote The Idiot Savants’ Guide to Rubberhose — which is the manual for Assange’s crypto program… but this business of naming the program gets complicated, eh?

Dreyfus explains:

If you’re wondering about the name of this program, Marutukku is the internal development name (it’s spelled Ru-b-b-e-r-h-o-s-e, but it’s pronounced M-a-r-u-t-u-k-k-u)

In case you didn’t get it, there may be a play on Lewis Carroll there, and the exchange Alice has with the White Knight in Through the Looking-Glass as to what the name of a certain very sad song is called.

Alice aside and such detours are in fact the very method of discovery in non-linear thinking Dreyfus offers as an epigraph to her piece the following quote:

The third name is MARUTUKKU, Master of the arts of protection, chained the Mad God at the Battle. Sealed the Ancient Ones in their Caves, behind the Gates.

which she attributes to “The Akkadian Creation Epic”. That would be the Enuma Elish.

Assange, in his One Man’s Search for a Cryptographic Mythology, attributes his choice of the name Marutukku to a conversation he had with a friend concerning the Enuma Elish, telling us (after much other curious and wandering stuff) that his friend recommended the god Marduk’s third name to him, saying

The third name is MARUTUKKU, Master of the arts of protection, chained the Mad God at the Battle. Sealed the Ancient Ones in their Caves, behind the Gates.

Assange liked the idea, observing, “Even the very word MARUTUKKU looked like it had been run through a product cipher”.

A little later in the same document, he quotes from the Enuma Elish, and the phrases given above appear in the quoted excerpts from that text although they are not present in the version “Based on the translation of E. A. Speiser, with the additions by A. K. Grayson, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, third edition, edited by James Pritchard (Princeton, 1969), pp. 60-72; 501-503, with minor modifications” that Assange offers us on the sibling-page at Enuma Elish.

As Dr. Rosenberg pointed out to me, “the quote — if it is a translation — differs from other translations I found on the Internet. It is more specific and extensive and ‘mythological.'”

4

Okay, I’ve kept what may be the most practical (ie 21st century) “creative leap” made by my skittish and wandering mind for this, my penultimate paragraph.

Oxford’s Anders Sandberg blogs today about Assange’s application of network theory to conspiracies, quoting Assange as saying:

Conspiracies are cognitive devices. They are able to out think the same group of individuals acting alone Conspiracies take information about the world in which they operate (the conspiratorial environment), pass it around the conspirators and then act on the result. We can see conspiracies as a type of device that has inputs (information about the environment) and outputs (actions intending to change or maintain the environment).

And Anders’ summary of Assange’s position? “In short, conspiracies are a kind of collective intelligence enhancement.”

[ admission: I associate the name Anders Sandberg with some brilliant early net writings on role-playing games and the hermetic tradition I’m hoping this is the same guy ]

5

Finally, let’s go back to that enhancement of the Enuma Elish text. That phrase, “Sealed the Ancient Ones in their Caves, behind the Gates” struck me, too it reminded me of the Chthulu Mythos of HP Lovecraft, and its apocalypse:

That cult would never die until the stars came right again and the secret priests would take Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild, and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

And with that quote from Lovecraft, courtesy of Erik Davis, we have returned by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to the hermetically sealing and revealing world of John Dee.

Portland and Closed Systems

by

The attempted terrorist attack in Portland was thwarted by the FBI. Ironically, in 2005 the Portland city council voted (by 4 to 1) to withdraw their city’s police officers from participation in the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Now, Portland’s mayor says he might ask the council to reconsider the decision about participation in this task force. Is it because he realizes that the threat of terrorism is real, and that anti-terrorism efforts like those being conducted by the Joint Task Force were indeed justified?…ie, that Portland was wrong in its initial decision? Not at all:

“[Adams] stressed that he has much more faith in the Obama administration and the leadership of the U.S. Attorney’s office now than he did in 2005”

I was reminded of something Arthur Koestler wrote about closed systems and the people who believe in them.

Read more

How to deal with North Korea

by

While I’ve been purposefully avoiding any news shows or blogs this weekend, the situation in North Korea forces me to post this potential solution to the problem. Let’s start with some premises.

1. NK is a buffer state for China. It exists at China’s will.
2. NK is a clear and present danger to its own people and to the world.
3. China, belligerent and “ascendant” as she may be, is linked to our currency and to our consumption of her cheap goods.

While I could add details and subheadings to the above, I think the premises are sound. If not please correct me.

With that in mind, why shouldn’t America, in the person of its CEO, simply offer China the ultimatum below.

Dear Hu,

This nation tires of the dangerous and evil games played by Kim Jong Il. He is a dangerous man who is actively destroying his own people. The United States has played the diplomatic games with this madman long enough, yet fully realizes that we have no optimal military option.

Given that you have it with in your power as a nation to change the nature of NK, and that you clearly are using NK as a threatening buffer state, I see no reason to remain diplomatically engaged with the buffer state puppet – Kim Jong Il. I think we will deal with your nation alone.

With that in mind, I offer the following ultimatum. You will immediately begin the process of forcing regime change in NK. The best solution would be for you to begin the process of reunification, but I would be happy to hear other alternatives.

If you fail to begin this process, I will use all my administrative powers, and lobby Congress to use its powers to shut down all trade with China until such regime change is effected.

Sincerely,

President Obama (or his successor)

Why shouldn’t we use trade as weapon in this situation? Aside from hurting Walmart’s stock price for a few quarters and losing a few transportation jobs in the interim, why can’t we do this? Discuss.

What the Dickens? Symbolic details in Inspire issue 3

by

[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]

It’s easily missed. It’s part of the “small print” that most small-format paperbacks carry on the copyright page:

The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as “unsold and destroyed.” Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this “stripped book.”

Here’s the picture that AQAP took of the copy of Dickens’ novel Great Expectations they inserted into one of their bombs recently which they then published in issue 3 of their English language magazine Inspire:

Dickens

And here’s the explanation that accompanies that photo, in a piece titled “The Objectives if Operation Hemorrhage” by their “Head of the Foreign Operations Team”:

This current battle fought by the West is not an isolated battle but is a continuation of a long history of aggression by the West against the Muslim world. In order to revive and bring back this history we listed the names of Reynald Krak and Diego Diaz as the recipients of the packages. We got the former name from Reynald de Chatillon, the lord of Krak des Chevaliers who was one of the worst and most treacherous of the Crusade’s leaders. He fell into captivity and Salahuddeen personally beheaded him. The name we used for the second package was derived from that of Don Diego Deza, the Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition after the fall of Granada who along with the Spanish monarchy supervised the extermination and expulsion of the Muslim presence on the Iberian Peninsula employing the most horrific methods of torture and done in the name of God and the Church. Today we are facing a coalition of Crusaders and Zionists and we in al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula will never forget Palestine. How can we forget it when our motto is: “Here we start and in al-Aqsa we meet”? So we listed the address of the “Congregation Or Chadash”, a Gay and Lesbian synagogue on our one of our packages. The second package was sent to “Congregation B’nai Zion”. Both synagogues are in Chicago, Obama’s city.
.
We were very optimistic about the outcome of this operation. That is why we dropped into one of the boxes a novel titled, Great Expectations.

They may not have read the book or seen the movie, as Ibn Siqilli comments at the link above, but they do have long memories and/or a taste for history, and they are indeed sending signals with small details like the fictitious names of their addressees.

*

This is in line with one of the basic premises of Islamic thought: that the world we inhabit is a world of ayat or symbols (the singular is ayah, and the word is also used to refer to the verses of the Qur’an, each of which is viewed as a symbolic utterance). Here, for instance, is a passage from Fazlun Khalid’s paper, Islam and the Environment, from the website of Jordan’s Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought:

The Qur’an refers to creation or the natural world as the signs (ayat) of Allah, the Creator, and this is also the name given to the verses contained in the Qur’an. Ayat means signs, symbols or proofs of the divine. As the Qur’an is proof of Allah so likewise is His creation. The Qur’an also speaks of signs within the self and as Nasr explains, “… when Muslim sages referred to the cosmic or ontological Qur’an … they saw upon the face of every creature letters and words from the cosmic Qur’an … they remained fully aware of the fact that the Qur’an refers to phenomena of nature and events within the soul of man as ayat … for them forms of nature were literally ayat Allah”. As the Qur’an says, “there are certainly signs (ayat) in the earth for people with certainty; and in yourselves. Do you not then see?” (Adh-Dhariat, 51:20, 21).

*

BTW, I don’t think Penguin (or, for that matter, Charles Dickens) got paid for that book… whatever their expectations may have been.