23 September 2006

The Risky Business of Geopolitics

Someone sent me this link to Ryan Mauro’s World Threats site featuring an interview with journalist Hamid Mir, who apparently is a chum of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri as he is among the last journalists to interview either.  (Mir’s Wikipedia entry, by the way, borrows heavily from his official site.)  I have no idea when the interview took place, or where, or what date the item was posted.

Mauro, for his part, is a teenager who calls himself the “Youngest Hired Geopolitical Analyst in North America” and seems to particularly relish in deconstructing Michael Moore, hardly something you’d expect a brilliant Hired Geopolitical Analyst to spend his time on.  I was very impressed, though, with Mr. Mauro’s speech against the New York Times in which he opined, “In order to be a traitor, you don’t need to like Osama Bin Laden.”  Liberals beware (except for Al Franken, who had Mauro on his show).  And Bill Clinton better watch his shit, because while he’s shouting from the Foxtops that “not a living soul in the world thought bin Laden had anything to do with” Somalia, Ryan Mauro sure did (though he was 6 years old at the time): a site called The American Thinker today writes that “according to Mauro … [Saddam] Hussein and bin Laden cooperated in the 1993 attack on U.S. peace keepers in Somalia.”  It’s fun to dabble in intrigue, innit?

At any rate, young Ryan put aside the Risk pieces for a little chinwag with Mir, in which the shadowy journalist tells us all sorts of fascinating and scary shit, such as:

Syria is a safe haven for Al-Qaeda now but the Syrian government is not trusted by the Al-Qaeda commanders in Iraq. I will not comment on North Korea.

and:

At least two Al-Qaeda operatives claimed that the organization smuggled suitcase nukes inside America. But I have no details on who did it. But I do have details about who smuggled uranium inside America and how.

and, recalling Pervez Musharraf’s little marketing funny yesterday with Bush:

My publisher has not authorized me to disclose the name of [my] book, but it will be a biography of Osama Bin Laden in which I will disclose his future plans and details of his nuclear designs. The world will come to know that which is the real Al-Qaeda.

Ya gotta love Mauro’s first sentence in the article though: “Hamid Mir truly has deep access inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.”   Short, sweet, exclamatory, no room for questions or doubt.  You also have to appreciate that Mauro seems allergic to attaching dates to his articles, which makes them appear timeless, eternal, ever-current.  All in all, it’s a big geoanalytical Fuck You, an Irkutsk right up the ole Kamchatka.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, while you're at it check this one out. (http://www.homelandsecurityus.com)

I want to be a geopolitical analyst too, but my 8 year old beat me to it...

~S

Anonymous said...

This is Ryan Mauro. Before attacking me, why don't you contact me for a response?

Anonymous said...

It might please you to know, Ryan (if this is you), that I received several emails from people wondering why I was praising you. At any rate, if you think what I posted was an "attack," I can kinda see why you buy into your own rhetoric.