Now That Would Have Been Some Marketing Meeting!

WOW!


If this marketing meeting had taken place, about the only thing that could rival it would be Lenny Bruce's "Religion Inc."


 


Seems the former Big Cheese of Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was fretting that his creation of terrorism and murder was losing its' marketing punch.


Osama wanted new name for al-Qaida to repair image

As Osama bin Laden watched his terrorist organization get picked apart, he lamented in his final writings that al-Qaida was suffering from a marketing problem. His group was killing too many Muslims and that was bad for business. The West was winning the public relations fight.


[snip]


The problem with the name al-Qaida, bin Laden wrote in a letter recovered from his compound in Pakistan, was that it lacked a religious element, something to convince Muslims worldwide that they are in a holy war with America.


Maybe something like Taifat al-Tawhed Wal-Jihad, meaning Monotheism and Jihad Group, would do the trick, he wrote. Or Jama'at I'Adat al-Khilafat al-Rashida, meaning Restoration of the Caliphate Group.


As bin Laden saw it, the problem was that the group's full name, al-Qaida al-Jihad, for The Base of Holy War, had become short-handed as simply al-Qaida. Lopping off the word "jihad," bin Laden wrote, allowed the West to "claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam." Maybe it was time for al-Qaida to bring back its original name.

I don't know ...

Coca Cola didn't get very far with their "New Coke" efforts


Then again, how would you like to be the young ad exec handling the account?


But Wait! ... There's More!


OBL, also, was getting all Jack-Lemmon-Save-The-Tiger, bemoaning the younger generation;

In one letter sent to Zawahri within the past year or so, bin Laden said al-Qaida's image was suffering because of attacks that have killed Muslims, particularly in Iraq, officials said. In other journal entries and letters, they said, bin Laden wrote that he was frustrated that many of his trusted longtime comrades, whom he'd fought alongside in Afghanistan, had been killed or captured.


Using his courier system, bin Laden could still exercise some operational control over al-Qaida. But increasingly the men he was directing were younger and inexperienced. Frequently, the generals who had vouched for these young fighters were dead or in prison. And bin Laden, unable to leave his walled compound and with no phone or Internet access, was annoyed that he did not know so many people in his own organization.

Guess he didn't apply to be on 'Undercover Boss'.


This ranks up there, before we get too derisive, with our own government labeling the killing of innocent civilians as "collateral damage."


Cue up "Que Sera Sera" ...


 


Bonus Riffs


Spencer Ackerman: Contest: Pick al-Qaida’s New Name


Jeff Neumann: Osama Bin Laden Worried About Al Qaeda’s Image Problem


Blackwater Going All Prince On Us (But You Can Pronounce The Name)

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition

Nice to find out, that when we were using The Koran for target practice, the guns and rifles our soldiers aimed, and shot, at the Muslim Holy Book, carried little mini-tweets of Christianity.

The Political Carnival calls them "Guns for Jesus".

U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret 'Jesus' Bible Codes ... Pentagon Supplier for Rifle Sights Says It Has 'Always' Added New Testament References

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.

U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious "Crusade" in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.

More, from Justin Elliott, at TPM;

The company is not shy about its belief system. It confirmed to ABC that its scopes have the Biblical codes. Trijicon's Web site even says under a section titled "Values" that, "We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on biblical standards throughout our history and we will strive to follow those morals."

[snip]

This is hardly the first time the Pentagon has come under fire for using religious messages in the course of conducting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. GQ reported last May on Donald Rumsfeld's presidential briefing folders that were peppered with Biblical quotes ("Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him...To deliver their soul from death.") printed on images of war.

Good thing this started during The Bush Grindhouse days.

Could you imagine the feces-throwing the Right Wing Freakshow Monkeys would be doing, if this came out of the Obama Administration?

They would, immediately, disregard that the little "LOL Jesus" messages, and claim it was a "Muslim code", confirming, once-and-for-all, that Obama is an illegal-alien-socialist-terrorist, intent on enslaving the entire country.

What's old, is new, again

PRAISE THE LORD AND PASS THE AMMUNITION

Geesh! ... They Could Have Used Wooly Willy ...

Oh man, this is a good one.

I suppose, since The Commander Guy, after his woody with the bullhorn, and all his "Bring it on!" and "Dead or Alive!", effectively, punted, and gave up the hunt, the FBI had to start somewhere when looking for the most notorious terrorist, this side of Cheney-Rumsfeld Smash-and-Grab Syndicate, Osama bin Laden.

But did they have to start in the Spanish Parliament?



Spanish MP's photo used for Osama Bin Laden poster

Gaspar Llamazares said he would no longer feel safe travelling to the US after his hair and parts of his face appeared on a most-wanted poster.

He said the use of a real person for the mocked-up image was "shameless".

The FBI admitted a forensic artist had obtained certain facial features "from a photograph he found on the internet".

[snip]

The FBI claimed to have used "cutting edge" technology, but Mr Llamazares said it showed the "low level" of US intelligence services and could cause problems if he was wrongly identified as the Saudi.

"Bin Laden's safety is not threatened by this but mine certainly is," he said, adding that he was considering taking legal action.

Later, an FBI spokesman told the BBC that it was "aware of the similarities in hairline features of the age-progressed photograph of Osama Bin Laden, posted on the web yesterday, and that of an existing photograph of a Spanish public official".

"When producing age-progressed photographs, forensic artists typically select features from a database of stock reference photographs to create the new image."

Holy Cow!

With their army of lab monkeys, and bloated budgets, some FBI schmuck does what I, and thousands of other bloggers do on a daily basis - head out to Google Images!

We could slash that budget by about 90% and just job out the work to some 7th grade somewhere in the country.

Or, they expense-account it, for about two-bucks ...

They could just have used Wooly Willy.





Bonus FBI Boners

Chris in Paris: FBI uses photo of Spanish MP to make updated bin Laden poster

Steve Hynd: FBI Alters Spanish MP's Picture, Calls Him Bin Laden

Paul Carr: NSFW: Nobody suspects the Spanish politician


Bonus Bonus

Retro Garlic: J. Edgars Gay Dating Service?

D.B. Cooper Is Barbarosa ... Or Is It Barbarosa Is D.B. Cooper?

Top Ten Cloves: Difficulties DC Comics' Batman May Have Fighting Osama bin Laden

Retro Garlic: We Called It, On The Terrorist-Killing Bears!

Once again, almost unfathomably, life has imitated The Garlic

We've had a handful of these instances, and on Tuesday, yet another.

Bear kills militants in Kashmir

A bear killed two militants after discovering them in its den in Indian-administered Kashmir, police say.

Two other militants escaped, one of them badly wounded, after the attack in Kulgam district, south of Srinagar.

The militants had assault rifles but were taken by surprise - police found the remains of pudding they had made to eat when the bear attacked.

It is thought to be the first such incident since Muslim separatists took up arms against Indian rule in 1989.

"Police found the remains of pudding ..."

I guess, despite all those terrorist training films, of jumping jacks and jungle gyms, the boys never gathered around the campfire, to read "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".

They would have know, the bears would be pissed off to find "pudding", instead of porridge.

Michael Stickings, over on The Reaction noted;

Oops. Not a smart move. How can these militants be expected to take over Kashmir if they can't even run their own cave without, you know, getting killed by a bear?

Don't they watch Animal Planet over there?



Anyway, here's the The Retro Part, from late 2006;

Developing Story - Polar Bears Added To Iraq Options ... Bush Administration Wavering On Polar Bears; Considering Employing In Iraq, War Against Terror ...Rove Claims He Also Has “The Science”, Says Bears “Will Do Fine In Desert Heat”

Rebecca Solnit: How 9/11 Should Be Remembered

It was nearly two-years ago that we highlighted Rebecca Solnit here on The Garlic, and, on this specific day, we are compelled to have her return.



Over on TomDispatch, Ms. Solnit has a fantastic post, an excerpt from her new book, that should be read by one-and-all;

How 9/11 Should Be Remembered - The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People

For this eighth anniversary of that terrible day, the first post-Bush-era anniversary, let's remember what actually happened:

When the planes became missiles and the towers became torches and then shards and clouds of dust, many were afraid, but few if any panicked, other than the President who was far away from danger. The military failed to respond promptly, even though the Pentagon itself was attacked, and the only direct resistance that day came from inside Flight 93, which went down in a field in Pennsylvania on its way to Washington.

[snip]

We failed, however, when we let our own government and media do what that small band from the other side of the Earth could not. Some of us failed, that is, for there were many kinds of response, and some became more radical, more committed, more educated. Mark Fichtel, the president of the New York Coffee, Sugar, and Cocoa Exchange, who scraped his knees badly that morning of September 11th when he was knocked over in a fleeing crowd, was helped to his feet by "a little old lady." He nonetheless had his Exchange up and running the next day, and six months later quit his job, began studying Islam, and then teaching about it.

[snip]

Far more people could have died on September 11th if New Yorkers had not remained calm, had not helped each other out of the endangered buildings and the devastated area, had not reached out to pull people from the collapsing buildings and the dust cloud. The population of the towers was lower than usual that morning, because it was an election day and many were voting before heading to work; it seems emblematic that so many were spared because they were exercising their democratic powers. Others exercised their empathy and altruism. In the evacuation of the towers, John Abruzzo, a paraplegic accountant, was carried down 69 flights of stairs by his coworkers.

[snip]

Many New Yorkers that day committed similar feats of solidarity at great risk. In fact, in all the hundreds of oral histories I read and the many interviews I conducted to research my book, "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster", I could find no one saying he or she was abandoned or attacked in that great exodus. People were frightened and moving fast, but not in a panic. Careful research has led disaster sociologists to the discovery -- one of their many counter-stereotypical conclusions -- that panic is a vanishingly rare phenomenon in disasters, part of an elaborate mythology of our weakness

[snip]

New Yorkers triumphed on that day eight years ago. They triumphed in calm, in strength, in generosity, in improvisation, in kindness. Nor was this something specific to that time or place: San Franciscans during the great earthquake of 1906, Londoners during the Blitz in World War II, the great majority of New Orleanians after Hurricane Katrina hit, in fact most people in most disasters in most places have behaved with just this sort of grace and dignity.

[snip]

After the 9/11 storm struck, the affected civilians in New York were seen as victims; after Katrina, those in New Orleans were portrayed as brutes. In both cities, the great majority of affected people were actually neither helpless nor savage; they were something else -- they were citizens, if by that word we mean civic engagement rather than citizenship status. In both places ordinary people were extraordinarily resourceful, generous, and kind, as were some police officers, firefighters, rescue workers, and a very few politicians. In both cases, the majority of politicians led us astray. All I would have wanted in that September moment, though, was politicians who stayed out of the way, and people who were more suspicious of the news and the newsmakers.

[snip]

The dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument, the living who coexist in peace in ordinary times and who save one another in extraordinary times. Civil society triumphed that morning in full glory. Look at it: remember that this is who we were and can be.

September 11th may never become the holiday, or, day-of-remembrance, it should be, chiefly due to the dwarf, finks, phonies and frauds of The Bush Grindhouse, and all the cronies - the Flying Monkeys of the Right Wing Freak Show, and the cheerleading Corporate Media - how they exploited the tragedy for the masturbation of their own warped ideology (ironically, killing hundreds-of-thousands more).

It takes ordinary people - like Rebecca Solnit, and many, many others - to put it in the right perspective.

Go read Rebecca Solnit's "How 9/11 Should Be Remembered - The Extraordinary Achievements of Ordinary People", and leave a comment, if you were able to keep your eyes dry while absorbing it.

And, you can go here to purchase her book, "A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster"

And, In The Coma Department ...

This is even sillier, more "dumb-as-a-doorknob" than that god-awful Sandra Bullock beauty pageant movie.



Miss Universe Visits Guantánamo Bay

Ms. Mendoza, who competed as Miss Venezuela, has a blog on the pageant’s Web site, and this account of the visit appeared there last Friday, after her deployment:

This week, Guantánamo!!! It was an incredible experience.

We arrived in Gitmo on Friday and stared going around the town, everybody knew Crystle and I were coming so the first thing we did was attend a big lunch and then we visited one of the bars they have in the base. We talked about Gitmo and what is was like living there. The next days we had a wonderful time, this truly was a memorable trip! We hung out with the guys from the East Coast and they showed us the boat inside and out, how they work and what they do, we took a ride around the land and it was a loooot of fun!

We also met the Military dogs, and they did a very nice demonstration of their skills. All the guys from the Army were amazing with us.

We visited the Detainees camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how the recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books. It was very interesting.


We took a ride with the Marines around the land to see the division of Gitmo and Cuba while they were informed us with a little bit of history.

The water in Guantánamo Bay is soooo beautiful! It was unbelievable, we were able to enjoy it for at least an hour. We went to the glass beach, and realized the name of it comes from the little pieces of broken glass from hundred of years ago. It is pretty to see all the colors shining with the sun. That day we met a beautiful lady named Rebeca who does wonders with the glasses from the beach. She creates jewelry with it and of course I bought a necklace from her that will remind me of Guantánamo Bay :)

I didn’t want to leave, it was such a relaxing place, so calm and beautiful.

Hmmm ... "Didn't want to leave ..."

Well there Miss Universe, you may not realize how lucky you are.

As a native Venezuelan, if you had wanted to visit Gitmo when The Bush Grindhouse was running things, you may have gotten your wish, in an attempt to embarrass your country's leader, getting slapped with an Enemy Combatant label, and warehousing you there for a few years.

Plenty of time to leaf through those art books, I suppose.

Eli, over on Firedoglake, puts it about right;

Yes, I'm sure Gitmo is lovely this time of year... if you're on the outside. And even if you're on the inside, why, it's just like summer camp, but without due process! Awesome!

Start the office pool for when the Lifetime, or "E", Channel movie pops on the screen, of a "Miss Universe", or "Miss World" visits a Gitmo-like place, sees the horrors, leads a frothing campaign against it, falls in love with the young, handsome Senator, and together, they save the world.