The Drooling Moron Plot

There’s a cliche in the movies known as “the idiot plot”. This is the movie in which the major conflict would be solved instantly if not for the fact that all the characters are a complete idiots. The classic example is the standard horror movie scenario: The hockey-masked killer is stalking the hallways of the high school/hospital/office building/whatever looking for fresh victims to dismember, and the main characters come up with the stupidest possible plan: “Let’s split up!”

Well, Crybaby Clay has come up with an improvement (?) on the idiot plot. Let’s call it the “drooling moron plot”. This variant requires that the reader be a drooling moron to accept Clay’s so-called “arguments”. A bit over a month ago, Crybaby Clay published a cartoon that repeated the long-discredited wingnut claim that the New York Times revealed a big secret when it published, in June 2006, an article detailing the US government’s use of the international banking transaction database called SWIFT to track the movement of money by terrorists. I pointed out to Clay that this fact was well known long before the NYT article, primarily due to a 1998 article in the Washington Post that noted the use of the SWIFT database for this precise purpose.

Crybaby Clay claimed he had a devastating counterargument that would demolish the assertion that the Washington Post article tipped off the terrorists years before the 2006 article appeared in the Times. He refused to reveal this bombshell, apparently believing that his claim alone would end the argument, and has maintained this farce for the past several weeks. Yesterday, Crybaby Clay finally deigned to publish this amazing work of deductive logic.

There’s only one word to describe what CC hath wrought:

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

What Crybaby Clay has posted doesn’t come close to being a “counterargument”. It is a collection of baseless assumptions and outright fantasies, nothing more. Let’s look at his alleged “reasoning”:

First, this is not a quote from a government official, or any one connected to the government in any way.

Second, there aren’t any transitions, either into this quote, or out of it, that would indicate that the journalist who wrote this piece got this idea from government officials.

Since the author didn’t quote a government official, nor receive this insight from a government offical it can only mean that this is speculation on his part.

Crybaby Clay seems to believe that anything he reads in a newspaper that doesn’t have quotation marks around it must, of necessity, have been pulled out of the reporters’ ass. This isn’t as surprising as it might seem. Crybaby Clay makes shit up out of whole cloth all the time, so naturally he would think that other people do the same thing.

It wouldn’t take anyone with a knowledge of SWIFT or CHIPS, and the ability to think outside the box in a manner that would include Information Warfare possibilites, much to come to the same speculative conclusion as to this being an option for the US Government.

What Clay is saying is that even a terrorist with little or no knowledge of the SWIFT database would be able to guess that the US might be trying to track his financial transactions. Well, guess what — that’s exactly what has happened, and it started long before the 2006 Times article was published.

But, an educated guess about what one thinks the government might do is not the same thing as proof that the government is, in fact, going to pursue that course of action.

Well, of course! If a the terrorists didn’t have absolute ironclad proof that the government was tracking his transactions through the banking system, they would naturally ignore the possibility and forget about using alternative means of moving the cash. This is the “drooling moron plot” again. Crybaby Clay is asking us to believe that (a) the numerous reports of the increasing use of cash smuggling by terrorists should simply be ignored, and (b) the terrorists are all the same sort of drooling moron that he is.

I know of no evidence that would support that the US Government was in fact pursuing that course of action to hinder Osama Bin Laden’s finances back in 1998.

Argumentum ad ignorantiam: Since Crybaby Clay doesn’t know about it, it didn’t happen.

Just because the author’s speculation became true, eventually, does not mean that the government was pursuing that option at the time he posited his guess about what the government might do.

Crybaby Clay argues that the report was “speculation” because he wasn’t at the reporter’s side during all the interviews, and did not hear with his own ears somebody telling the reporter about the government’s use of SWIFT. Oh, and the terrorists were the same variety of drooling moron, and would discount the report for the same reason.

It’s highly unlikely that the terrorists even noticed the 1998 Washington Post article or the author’s speculative guess about what the US government might do.

It’s “highly unlikely that the terrorists even noticed the 1998 Washington Post article” BECAUSE! CLAY! SAYS! SO! Crybaby Clay is one of the world’s foremost experts on the reading habits of international terrorists. Just ask him.

It’s a pretty safe bet that since the NY Times article, the US Government’s use of SWIFT has now been rendered useless, just as US Government officials feared might happen should the NY Times publish it’s article.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight. Once again, we are supposed to believe Crybaby Clay’s suppositions are somehow credible — even after he demonstrated clearly that he had no idea that the use of the SWIFT database to track terrorist finances had been revealed publicly years before.

So, which article is more threatening to National Security and how we conduct our war against terrorism?

That isn’t the question. The question was and is: With the revelation in 1998 that the US Government would use SWIFT to track terrorist finances, how can it be a big secret in mid-2006 that the US Government uses SWIFT to track terrorist finances? Answer: It cannot possibly be a secret… unless you’re a right-wing mouthbreather like Crybaby Clay, who substitutes your own ignorance for the facts and your own fantasies for logic.

I first commented on Crybaby Clay’s horseshit shortly after he published it, and what I said then still holds true:

The claim that this monitoring was a deep, dark secret tactic until the NYT published their report was quickly debunked when Victor Comras pointed out that:

…reports on US monitoring of SWIFT transactions have been out there for some time. The information was fairly well known by terrorism financing experts back in 2002.

I pointed out at the time how utterly without merit the claim of “treason” was. Nothing has changed since then — it’s still an incredibly stupid and dishonest accusation to make.

Poor, dumb Clay. He is either being deliberately dishonest by dredging up this ancient right-wing lie, or he really is so pathetically ignorant that he doesn’t know how quickly and thoroughly the accusations of “treason” were discredited. Either way, there is one and only one lesson that Clay’s latest droolings can teach us: