Let me get this straight: We fund the CIA with $billions, and OBL videos...

[Junkdrawer]

are tracked on the Internet by PRIVATE security firms???

:wtf:

A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.

Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company's Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.

The founder of the company, the SITE Intelligence Group, says this premature disclosure tipped al-Qaeda to a security breach and destroyed a years-long surveillance operation that the company has used to intercept and pass along secret messages, videos and advance warnings of suicide bombings from the terrorist group's communications network.

...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/08/AR2007100801817_pf.html

Here's a link to "SITE Intelligence Group"

http://www.siteinstitute.org/

If Osama bin Laden was the mastermind/financier of 9/11, should the tracking of his activities be left to 'A small private intelligence company'.

Anyone else find this odd...

[woodsprite]

1. Call it tinfoil, but I figured they were the 'distributors' of the film. n/t

[Junkdrawer]

2. Something weird goes on...

First of all, the videos always appear at the most opportune times.

Then, in the latest one, the video image pauses when current events are discussed.

And now we hear that only small, private firms track the guy they say did the deed that launched the whole Bush War on Terror.

PS:

Note how this little tidbit was just casually dropped in the Wash Post story - nothing odd about the private firm, you see, it's the Administration's premature leaking of the video that should enrage you.

[juno jones]

3. Yeah,

Maybe it was leaked before they could do the final CGI to coordinate his lips with the discussion of 'current events'. What got leaked was a work-in-progress, and the chimp f'd that one up.

[Javaman]

4. OBL is a cottage industry just like the war on drugs. nt

[Flabbergasted]

5. Very "odd."

[spanone]

6. we give our military thousands of billions......

[Disturbed]

7. There is a foul odor about this story. Where is the stink coming

from?

[Junkdrawer]

8. A small production studio with advanced CGI software and a BIG budget.

Just a guess...

[spanone]

9. it's the audio-visual department of the cia...run by nerds producing osama tapes season 6

[Junkdrawer]

10. You see, all indications are that the Bad Old CIA has gone private....

I think that's the big story of the last 30 odd years - the Imperialists went private. Read Joseph Trento's books about how the CIA developed their own financial sources.

[Junkdrawer]

11. PS: I'm rereading H.G. Wells "Outline of History" and here's a fun fact:

Q.) Between, say, 1750 and 1850, which country had the largest foreign empire?

A.) None. The largest empire was owned by a private company: The East India Trading Company.

On edit:

During its heyday, the East India Company not only established trade through Asia and the Middle East but also effectively became of the ruler of territories vastly larger than the United Kingdrom itself. In addition, it also created, rather than conquered, colonies. Singapore, for example, was an island with very few Malay inhabitants in 1819 when Sir Stamford Raffles purchased it for the Company from their ruler, the Sultan of Johor, and created what eventually became one of the world's greatest trans-shipment ports.


http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/eic.html