Friday, July 13, 2007
Iran smashes a spy ring
Iran's counterintelligence has sprung in action:
Police in Iran are reported to have taken 14 squirrels into custody - because they are suspected of spying.
Britain's latest secret weapon?The rodents were found near the Iranian border allegedly equipped with eavesdropping devices.
The reports have come from the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).
When asked about the confiscation of the spy squirrels, the national police chief said: "I have heard about it, but I do not have precise information."
The IRNA said that the squirrels were kitted out by foreign intelligence services - but they were captured two weeks ago by police officers.
That was sneaky using squirrels. They would have suspected the weasels right away. In any case, I hope and pray that "kitting out" spy squirrels does not represent the entire breadth and depth of Western black ops in Iran. If so, start re-stocking your bomb shelter.
CWCID: The Expat Yank, who wonders "when they will be paraded on TV?"
18 Comments:
By 
, at
Fri Jul 13, 04:19:00 PM:
The success of the Zionist giant badger program in Basra emboldened the enemy to enlist squirrels. We'll find out where the nuts are buried.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x2913050
By 
ScottM, at
Fri Jul 13, 04:31:00 PM:
Those Iranians are so paranoid.
The squirrels are probably just archaeologists.
http://cbs13.com/topstories/local_story_194095839.html
By Shrill Will, at
Fri Jul 13, 05:10:00 PM:
I guess animal bugs have come a long way since the '60s era Spy Cats.
By Purple Avenger, at
Fri Jul 13, 06:23:00 PM:
Squirrels are very devious. Good thing they nipped this in the bud
By , at
Fri Jul 13, 06:46:00 PM:
If they've nabbed Secret Squirrel, the Morocco Mole had better watch his back. He will be next.
By Joseph, at
Fri Jul 13, 07:24:00 PM:
Squirrels have a political agenda.
By Escort81, at
Fri Jul 13, 08:59:00 PM:
This comment has been removed by the author.
By Escort81, at
Fri Jul 13, 09:03:00 PM:
Tehran obviously remembers how effective Rocky and Bullwinkle were against Boris and Natasha, and don't want to take any chances.
Reading the Sky News piece in the provided link, the closing graph (reciting other cases of animals used in intelligence matters) states:
It is even claimed that M15 once planned to recruit a team of specially-trained gerbils as a secret weapon to sniff out spies.
Could this be a clever and oblique reference to the sexual orientation of certain significant British spies (Philby, et al) and the practice of using small rodents in a particular type of gratification?
Or does the British press use a Friday the 13th in the same way we use April 1?
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Sat Jul 14, 02:54:00 AM:
This story doesn't pass the sniff test. Did anybody actually see it at IRNA?
By TigerHawk, at
Sat Jul 14, 06:23:00 AM:
DEC,
Far be it from me to claim that anything one reads in the SkyNews (or elsewhere in the mainstream media) must be true. I have no idea, and I agree about the sniff test. It is still pretty funny, though, especially coming as it does in the same week as the "killer badger" stories.
By Purple Avenger, at
Sat Jul 14, 09:52:00 AM:
This story doesn't pass the sniff test. Did anybody actually see it at IRNA?
I did, about a week ago. It was NOT on the english version of the site though. The story only appeared in the Farsi pages.
IRNA apparently has two classes of stories. Internal consumption and external consumption. The stuff making it to the external consumption side is carefully vetted so dumb stuff like this doesn't make it into English.
By , at
Sat Jul 14, 10:36:00 AM:
Rocky the Flying Sruirell had better stay away from IRAN or BULLWINKLE will lose his pal
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Sat Jul 14, 12:58:00 PM:
To: Purple Avenger
"...two classes of stories. Internal consumption and external consumption."
That's one of the reasons I have multilingual translators on my staff. If you were not joking about the story being in the "Farsi pages," please send me a link. IRNA maintains an archive of its stories going back to 2004.
Only a handful of minor news outlets globally touched the story and nearly all of them used Sky News as the source. In a post at The Corner, Andy McCarthy used TH as the source. Normally this kind of offbeat news item, even from "Farsi pages," appears in dozens of different newspapers around the world. This story didn't.
To TH
"in the same week as the 'killer badger' stories"
Ratels (honey badgers) are native to southern Iraq. Urban residents in the country almost never see them. The panic is understandable.
Ratels are mean little guys with the courage of a lion. When they attack, they go for the groin. They have a lot in common with American women.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Sat Jul 14, 01:16:00 PM:
P.S. Some years ago in East Africa, a small ratel reportedly killed a full grown bull by ripping off his testicles.
By Escort81, at
Sat Jul 14, 03:23:00 PM:
DEC -
Well, I have only myself to blame for introducing lower abdominal humor to this thread, but the last two posts about Ratels are really gruesome. Nature has a way of showing how truly Darwinian the world can be, and that all mammals have strong survival instincts.
Humans try to play by a moral set of rules that seemingly sets us apart from other mammals. As Austin Powers would say in reference to "going for the groin": That's just not cricket.
By , at
Sun Jul 15, 08:45:00 AM:
WARNING! This opinion piece is not for die-hard, true-believing Bush backers (or Bush bashers, for that matter) or anyone else whose ideology interferes with his or her ability to think clearly about complex issues and pressing problems. Others are encouraged to continue reading....
Absorbing the news about Iraq, Pakistan and Al Qaeda, one cannot help but reel at the sheer stupidity and utter incompetence of the Bush administration. It has actually discredited ... and appears to be losing ... the war against radical Islam, or Islamism.
The foreign policy failures transcend the war, important as it is. From Asia to Latin America, American foreign policy is an awful mess as rising China and resurgent Russia remarkably draw closer together and the United States increasingly resembles the dying (but still dangerous) hegemon depicted by Chinese analysts and propagandists.
With the above in mind, many questions cry out for answers. A baker's dozen ... the list appears below.
1. Immediately following the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11--the worst-ever attacks on American soil--why didn't President Bush ask Congress for a formal declaration of war on Afghanistan, the Taliban-controlled country that sheltered and aided Al Qaeda?
2. Why didn't the President end immigration from predominantly Muslim lands--and revoke the visas of virtually all aliens from Muslim lands--pending a US victory over Islamism?
3. Invoking World War II, with the whole nation and much of the world seemingly supporting the US, why did the President proclaim a war on terrorism--a tactic or strategy--instead of rallying the nation for an all-out assault against Islamism, the enemy that had actually attacked the US and was clearly only using terrorism until it could get its hands on nuclear bombs or nuclear-tipped missiles? FDR did not identify the Nazi/Fascist enemy as blitzkriegism or concentration camp-ism....
4. Why was the Bush administration so concerned with airlifting home Saudi nationals in the immediate aftermath of 9/11? Why did the White House lie about this unprecedented operation until the media forced its disclosure?
5. Why did the US fail to respond to the attacks from Afghanistan with blinding speed and awesome ferocity, annihilating Al Qaeda and the Taliban while setting an example for decades to come regarding the likely fate of foreign foes who dare to slaughter Americans on US soil? Why were Taliban leader Mullah Omar (anyone remember that monster?) and Al Qaeda chief Osama Binladen (whose ultra-rich relatives were among those secretly airlifted home to Saudi Arabia) and their most senior leaders (including Binladen's top henchman and Al Qaeda's chief ideologist, Egyptian physician and probable Anwar Sadat assassination co-conspirator Ayman al-Zawahri) given so much time to plot and plan their escape from Afghanistan? Why did the US rely on notoriously unreliable Afghan warlords to kill or capture the enemy leaders? Why wasn't the Tora Bora cave complex that served as the last Al Qaeda stronghold before Binladen's escape wiped off the map? Why are the mass-murdering Islamist criminals still at large?
6. On 9/12, why did the US immediately focus on Iraq instead of Iran? Why did the US use 9/11 as a pretext for invading a contained secular enemy, Iraq, instead of ending the nuclearizing, missile-mad mullahocracy? (Again, one can't help but think about WW II and FDR. Imagine if the US had responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor by invading Stalinist Russia in order to install democracy capable of spreading to Germany, Japan, and Italy. Not an exact analogy, but still...)
7. Speaking of Iraq, if the Pentagon really believed Saddam had weaons of mass destruction (anyone remember the so-called ring of chemical fire around Baghdad and the deployable WMD arsenals allegedly stored in vast, man-made, command-and-control bunker complexes?) why did it grant unprecedented access to the media, embedding satellite video-phone-equipped reporters with front-line troops in order to transmit live, 24/7 moving images of the conflict? It defies logic and common sense to think that the Pentagon would have risked exposing millions of TV viewers to gruesome pictures of American troops under chemical attack.
8. Why did the US invest so heavily in nuclear-armed-and-proliferating Pakistan--an Islamist-leaning nation whose intelligence agencies practically created the Taliban and worked closely with Al Qaeda--and still do--and apparently ignore secular Syria? Did the administration make every possible effort to lure Syria away from Iran? It is hard to believe that back then the despot of Damascus, himself threatened by the Islamist tide, could not have been bought for a few billion dollars a year in foreign assistance.
9. Why did the US so badly underestimate Hamas? Who in the administration was/is reponsible for promoting the notion of a moderate, even democratic, brand of Islamism? You might as well be talking about democratic fascism or moderate Nazism....
10. Why did the Pentagon feel the need to fabricate and lie about the circumstances surrounding the wounding and capture of Jessica Lynch and the friendly-fire killing of Pat Tillman? Have the jerks ressponsible for damaging US credibility with these horrible hoaxes been appropriately punished or fired?
11. Why has the US failed to cooperate closely with Russia in the war against Islamism and instead focused on alleged Russian human rights abuses in restive Muslim areas ... while moving into Central Asia, Moscow's traditional sphere of influence, in ways that recall the "Great Game" between imperial rivals Czarist Russia and Britain? Why has US foreign policy under Bush seemed bent on antagonizing a post-Communist Kremlin and driving it closer to its Cold War-era Communist rival, China (e.g. the Shanghai Cooperation Organization)? Where is the logic, the common sense in this policy?
12. Why does the US so passively submit to China's currency manipulation and military expansion--including development of space weapons and a blue-water navy--and downplay the growing Chinese threat to the US economy, the US food supply, and US national security?
13. Why does the Bush administration seem so disconnected from reality and absolutely incapable of communicating to the American people--and the international community--in a truthful, accurate and effective manner?
From: http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/
By Georg Felis, at
Mon Jul 16, 01:40:00 PM:
Ok, I normally don’t respond to off-topic trolls, but this one deserves a quick rolled up newspaper to the nose.
1-4 Because if Bush had gone for a declaration of war against Afghanistan, it would have been a State-vs-State war, with all the side effects involved. Primarily Islamic countries world wide would have been pressured to join against us, etc… Instead Bush pointed right to the heart of the enemy, Islamic Facism. We do not wage war against the vast majority of Islam, only the nutty center. Or would you rather be involved in an all-out world war against dozens of Islamic countries worldwide? How long would the war have lasted if all the Islamic countries had just turned off their oil exports?
I am constantly amazed at the Liberal war critics who so vastly overestimate the ability of the US military to wage war while at the same time decrying any effort to do the same. What would be the capitol of the state of Islamism that we would bomb? What kind of world wide backlash would the US face for doing so?
5-6. Exactly opposite of reality. We were on the ground in Afghanistan within weeks of 9/11. By the time the Dems had their announcement complaining about the lack of progress, the Northern Alliance had begun rolling thru the country. We spent *months* negotiating with Saddam, after spending 8 years negotiating with Saddam during Clinton, we thought he had WMDs, he thought he had WMDs, his generals thought he had WMDs, he had quite firmly established his “cred” as a threat, and after 9/11 we just could not ignore it. We had no on-site native forces that could be used without horrible consequences (Turkey would have popped if we had used the Kurds), and we had to do it with the Coalition.
7+ The rest of the article wanders off into the normal conspiracy theory and BDS of the Truthers. Not really worth stomping, and I have work to do. Nice of him to leave his blog, I’ll send him a copy.
By Georg Felis, at
Mon Jul 16, 01:46:00 PM:
Rats (or Squirrels, I guess to go with this topic). His blog does not permit comments. I guess he does not want a discussion, he just wants a free soapbox.
