From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Tue Dec 22 2009 - 20:25:47 EST
Revealed: Bush White House Raised Terror Alert Based On Con Man's Wild Al
Jazeera "Decoding" Claims
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on December 21, 2009, Printed on December 22, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/144722/
>From the Dept. of You-Can't-Make-This-Shit-Up, TPM Muckracker reports:
A self-styled Nevada codebreaker convinced the CIA he could decode secret
terrorist targeting information sent through Al Jazeera broadcasts,
prompting the Bush White House to raise the terror alert level to Orange
(high) in December 2003, with Tom Ridge warning of "near-term attacks that
could either rival or exceed what we experience on September 11," according
to a new report in Playboy.
We all knew the DHS color-coded terror alerts were bogus and
politically-motivated -- Ridge himself recently admitted as much -- but
this? This is just ... loony tunes.
According to TPM, "the man who prompted the December 2003 Orange alert was
Dennis Montgomery, who has since been embroiled in various lawsuits,
including one for allegedly bouncing $1 million in checks during a Caesars
Palace spree. His former lawyer calls him a 'habitual liar engaged in
fraud.'"
He must have been a pretty good liar to have pulled this off (at least one
would hope):
Working out of a Reno, Nevada, software firm called eTreppid Technologies,
Montgomery took in officials in the CIA's Directorate of Science and
Technology and convinced them that technology he invented -- but could not
explain -- was pulling terrorist-produced "bar codes" from Al Jazeera
television broadcasts. Using his proprietary technology, those bar codes
could be translated into longitudes and latitudes and flight numbers.
Terrorist leaders were using that data to direct their compatriots about
the next target.
The original article quotes a "former CIA official" who was incredulous
when he discovered the arrangement between the agency and Montgomery:
The federal government was acting on the Al Jazeera claims without even
understanding how Montgomery found his coordinates. "I said, 'Give us the
algorithms that allowed you to come up with this stuff.' They wouldn't even
do that," says the first officer. "And I was screaming, 'You gave these
people fucking money?'" ...
In a detail that should really piss off right-wingers, credit for calling
out this bullshit artist goes to ... France.
A branch of the French intelligence services helped convince the Americans
that the bar codes were fake. The CIA and the French commissioned a
technology company to locate or re-create codes in the Al Jazeera
transmission. They found definitively that what Montgomery claimed was
there was not. Quietly, as far as the CIA was concerned, the case was
closed. The agency turned the matter over to the counterintelligence side
to see where it had gone wrong.
Incredibly, according to TPM, "Former Homeland Security adviser Frances
Townsend defended the use of Montgomery's 'intelligence' in an interview
with Playboy, telling the magazine, 'It didn't seem beyond the realm of
possibility.'"
Read more in TPM.
Read the original article.
Liliana Segura is a staff writer and editor of AlterNet's Rights and
Liberties and World Special Coverage. Follow her on Twitter.