At the End of the Day

David Cameron told us today that he finds the appearance of horsemeat in 100% beefburgers on sale in our supermarkets “extremely disturbing and totally unacceptable”. A common expression in the US (based on an old Burger King campaign of thirty years ago) is “Where’s the beef?” – meaning, where is the content in this or that piece of marketing or political puffery, such as ‘Yes We Can’ for example. Today, all over Britain, people are asking “Why the Horse?”

I find it very hard to believe that horsemeat is cheaper than beef. We’re talking economies of scale here after all, and so I’m mystified by this scam: is this a new vanguard of anti-capitalism deliberately reducing margins in order to implode the system?

So far we just don’t know. But in the meantime, I think we should compare and contrast Dave’s extremely and totally. I mean, you don’t need a totally in front of an unacceptable: it’s like saying “slightly dead”…it is a comparative colliding with an absolute to produce a convolute. It is the sort of thing expensively half-educated pillocks say. Slightly more interesting, however, is the fact that Cammers also finds this horsey revelation extremely disturbing.

For myself, I find it mildly surprising (see earlier re price factors) but not on the basis of eating horse. Eating viande de cheval in France is pretty normal, and for some a delicacy. But the likes of Dave and his best friend Rebekah Redtop tend to ride horses rather than eat them, and so this discovery of yet more skullduggery is to them extremely disturbing. I’m damned if I know why: we eat cows, sheep, lambs, goats and many another four-legged beast of the field. We even use horses to chase and kill foxes, whose meat is (I’m told) unpalateable. Such behaviour strikes me as extremely disturbed – but probably not the Prime Minister.

Mr Cameron is as I type flying to somewhere to make a speech about something to do with the EU, although tonight’s latest is that he will postpone this due to the late-in-the-day Foreign Office discovery that Islamist terrorism is a complete pain in the arse. One wonders what the authorities will do next on the question of Islam, but there may be something about it that they’re missing…and so it falls to me to point it out.

There has been much talk over the years of the British media demonising Islamists, but in truth the verb to demonise tends to be reflexive when it comes to Islamic terrorists. The chief entry criterion if you want to be a Jihadist is, let’s face it, the possession of wonky eyes, hooks, and curly beards down to the knee.  Thus we can observe that the latest in this genetically-joined line of Killers for Islam is one Abu al-Baraa, and here he is (left).

Just like Abu-Hamza, he sports the informally focusing eye. And while he lacks the Captain Hook feature, it is safe to say that Mr al-Baraa would not pull well on a dating agency site, if only because most applicants would assume he is more kalashnikosexual than sexual stallion.

I think the main point I’m trying to register here is that from Osama Bin Laden onwards, The Islamist Front for the Stoning of Infidels appears to have been a magnet for swivel-eyed nutters. Judging by the latest news from the ransomists of Algeria tonight, the trend continues.

Oddly enough, having a bizarre boat-race is also the key requirement if you wish to rise to the top of that other infamous cradle of financial terrorism, the European Union. Here (right) is one of the more luminary of the 23 leaders of Europe, Herman van Rompuy. Had David Cameron delivered his speech tomorrow, van Rompuy would’ve been one of the keener listeners. But before hearing any of the speech – which was pretty obviously going to ask for a radical new Union Treaty – Herman opined that “We do not need anything like as much Treaty change as people think. Too much change would open the floodgates”.

Whatever you do people, don’t open those f**king floodgates. Do not under any circumstances let any freedom or democracy drown this perfect Oasis of well-managed economic growth, fiscal control, and lean bureaucracy we have over there in Brussels. Otherwise, the results could be truly disastrous.

It is indeed a sobering thought. Perhaps even extremely disturbing….and on a bad day, totally unacceptable.

BIN LADEN RAID: How Obama chose his time to kill Osama.

CIA satellite shots…new enrichment plant circled

Bin Laden raid’s timing ‘was connected to Pakistan’s A-bomb programme’.

There are suggestions that – far from taking the decision to attack OBL’s compound after a lengthy stakeout – President Obama took the decision quickly….having known for a considerable time precisely where the late Al Q’eida boss was holed up. And that disturbing intelligence about advances at Pakistan’s atomic weapons centre played a decisive role in his decision to take out Bin Laden.

Eight days ago, a Newsweek exclusive got the scoop on satellite images obtained by the American security services, showing unequivocal evidence of a massive step-up in the speed of Pakistan’s progress towards having a deliverable nuclear weapon. Although technically Islamic rather than Islamist as a State, Pakistan looks likely to become the world’s first Muslim member of the Atomic club….certainly, long before Iran does.

Yesterday morning, a leading German newspaper refuted the idea of Abbottabad as a sleepy backwater. A report from the town in Northern Pakistan by Der Spiegel  added fuel to the theory that most security services knew where Bin Laden was. In fact, the Spiegel piece suggests strongly that Abbottabad itself has been recognised for years as a meeting place for Al Q’eida operatives – a place where those on the run could find succour – and a nerve centre for Pakistani elite military training.

A few months ago, the allegedly ‘sleepy town’ played host to Umar Patek, the presumed mastermind behind the bomb attacks in Bali nine years ago — a man who has a US$1 million bounty on his head. Der Spiegel asked if the bomber was  ‘on his way to meet up with bin Laden’ when he was arrested by the Pakistanis. Certainly, this is what Indonesia’s defence minister claimed two weeks ago.

US Intelligence had, it has been alleged, been anxious for some time about the proximity of Islamist terrorists to Pakistan’s military and training facilities in Abbottabad. Says Der Spiegel (my italics):

‘This city of 150,000 in the Himalayan foothills is home to a military academy and elite schools. For years, it enjoyed a reputation for being a peaceful oasis….but the city of Abbottabad, this place where two of the kingpins of global terror had found refuge, isn’t what it seems. It is here that Pakistan’s army, propped up as it is by US military assistance, has its most elite training academy – a mere 900 meters from where bin Laden was living…”

The Slog is fascinated by this report, because it confirms what I learned from a UK-based military source shortly after the raid: that American advisers “regularly visit the academy”. My source opined, “It seems to me unlikely that the US didn’t know Bin Laden was there. Everyone knew Bin Laden was there”.

He went on to tell me:

“I doubt if Obama cared that much about nailing Bin Laden really. I think his main objective was to show he could act at will if the Pakistanis got any fancy ideas about letting Islamist nations in on their nuclear progress”. This is reflected in the actions of the Seals in destroying the converted, cutting-edge Black Hawk helicopter for fear it might fall into the wrong hands: although as we’ve seen, this wasn’t entirely successful.

If the prior knowledge + A-Bomb motivation story is true, then The Slog may well have underestimated President Obama. But is it really credible that the US Government had known for years where Osama Bin Laden was?

The Slog posted recently that a British couple travelling in the region were allegedly warned off a hotel because it was “too close to Bin Laden’s compound”. And the same military source quoted earlier had suggested to me some time ago that the SAS probably established where Bin Laden was some time in 2005.

Either way, Umar Patek didn’t stay hidden for long. On Jan. 25, 2011, ISI officers arrested the Indonesian. Although caught just two miles from OBL’s hideout, Pakistan’s secret police hunted him down in three weeks flat: but allegedly didn’t know where Global Enemy Number One was for over six years.

On a lighter note, Washington wags suggest that the CIA has been cooperating with the Polish secret service about where Joe Biden is hiding out. Well it made me laugh anyway.

Read the whole saga at Obama Bin’ Lyin’

BIN LADEN RAID: The plot thickens, darkens, and then goes cold.

We will never know the full truth about the Abbottabad Bin Laden raid, except that it was full of lies

Would you buy a used compound from this man?

Last week,  The Slog heard third-hand that a British couple travelling in Pakistan had arrived in Abbottabad some months ago, to be advised by a local on their arrival, “Don’t choose that hotel….it’s too near to Bin Laden’s compound”. Far fetched? I thought so at the time, but as more truth filtered out about the double-dealing in which both Pakistani and US officials had engaged in the past that led to OBL’s execution, I began to wonder.

I had already learned from a low-level Pakistani source that ISI knew perfectly well where Bin Laden was. Further, he claimed, they knew equally well that the Americans were going to take him out “at some point in the near future”. This is, of course, easy to claim after the event.

One or two US sites also picked up on something I was told, but didn’t print – because, to be frank, it sounded daft: that the SAS knew where Bin Laden was pretty much from the year he moved in (late 2005). A military source told me they had trailed Bin Laden after his narrow cave-battle escape, and then kept an eye on the compound via helicopter patrols from a base near to Islamabad. This is not a source I know well.

So I was greatly intrigued to read yesterday’s Guardian piece claiming that, under a deal hammered out between Musharraf and Bush ten years ago, Pakistan would allow US forces to conduct a unilateral raid inside Pakistan in search of Bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the al-Qaida No3. Afterwards, both sides agreed, Pakistan would vociferously protest the incursion.

“There was an agreement between Bush and Musharraf that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him,” said a former senior US official with knowledge of counterterrorism operations. “The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn’t stop us.”

None of this explains why the Pakistanis didn’t actually put up any more than a token grumble about the Navy Seals raid. Nor why a horde of locals should tell the BBC that (a) they didn’t believe OBL was the old bloke watching Magic Roundabout CDs on his telly, and (b) if the bloke had really been there, they’d have known. (Their point being that they didn’t).

To rephrase an old gag, opinions on this saga are like agendas: everyone’s got one. Telling truth from lies, fantasy and deliberate obfuscation is well-nigh impossible. The Pakistani ISI is renowned in the intelligence community for its ability to make the CIA seem like Cistercian monks by comparison. And as we’ve seen from the start of Obama Bin Lyin’, the White House has chosen every last scrap of evidence – however atypical – to make the raid look like the bravest caper since Spartacus took on the Roman armies.

This was still continuing over the weekend, as the Obamites insisted that an old bloke in ragged clothes was running a worldwide operation down to the last stick of gelignite. On the one hand he’s a coward hiding behind girlies and shuffling about in a YMCA hostel, but on the other he’s an evil mastermind preparing to blow up every train in America. Obviously, one at least of these presentations is bollocks. And most people, surely, will have been unimpressed by calculations found on the guy’s hard drive about how many US citizens would have to be rubbed out before Washington surrendered. That is the act of a fantasist with delusions of grandeur – a personality summation that many of those close to Bin Laden arrived at sooner or later. (Why does that remind me of Julian Assange?)

So unless something absolutely mega comes to light, The Slog is signing off from this at times variously disappointing, idiotic, spin-suffused and hilarious episode. Obama is now in full re-election mode, somewhere an Al Q’eida headcase is planning to nuke a major city, and the hard-core nutters are busy constructing theories about why Bin Laden is not dead at all, but waiting on tables at Caesar’s Palace.

Thanks for staying with us: but now there are bigger fish to fry. The Chinese slowdown, the EU meltdown, the Murdoch shakedown…….