Anwar al-Awlaki's Death

The US is announcing the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who moved to Yemen where he waged jihad against his former homeland. Assuming this is true — and not a repeat of what happened in 2009 when Awlaki was falsely reported as dead — it’s a major blow against one of al Qaida’s superstars.

What made Awlaki so dangerous wasn’t his so-called operational abilities, as the U.S. is now claiming, although no one is actually bothering to ask what that means. Awlaki was an intellectual, not a fighter. What made Awlaki so dangerous was his somewhat unique ability to inspire disaffected Muslims in the West to take up arms in the cause of jihad.

Awlaki may have rejected the West, but he knew how it worked. He spent many years here in San Diego and spoke both Arabic and English beautifully. Recordings of his sermons are very popular. He also knew how to use the Internet to reach people. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that U.S. counterterrorism officials started linking him to terrorism in the very same month that Awlaki started his now-defunct jihadist website.

What I always found fascinating about this so-called holy man got busted for prostitution twice in San Diego and was picked up by San Diego police for “hanging around a school.”  Maybe that’s why he needed his martyrdom, so he could wash his sins away. (I’ve written about him before here.  I also put together a comprehensive timeline.)

I won’t be shedding any tears for a man who plotted to kill Americans and praised the Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan as a “hero.” But Awlaki wasn’t Osama bin Laden. He wasn’t an Iraqi insurgent or a Taliban trying to kill U.S. troops. Awlaki a U.S. citizen.

He knew his death would point out the hypocrisy of a country with a constitution that guarantees its citizens due process of law and then goes out and assassinates them in Yemen with a drone strike. He knew we would succumb to our fears.

Like it or not, he was one of our own.

Fitness in 100 words

I’ve been getting way into fitness lately. Here’s what I’ve learned so far in about 100 words:

  1. You can change your life without changing your body. But not the other way around.
  2. You don’t need strength until you realize you don’t have it and you wish you did.
  3. Eat food that comes from living things.
  4. Don’t copy people in the gym. Most don’t know what they’re doing.
  5. Don’t just sit there.
  6. Fitness is strength, yes, but it’s also balance, flexibility, agility, power and endurance.
  7. There is no substitute for hard work.
  8. True fitness is beautiful movement. See gymnastics, dancing and martial arts.
  9. If your core is weak, you’re weak.
  10. Avoid routine. Try everything.

Reader haunted by encounter with man who attended San Diego mosque

I received this striking comment today from a reader who commented on my 2009 post on the San Diego connections to the Fort Hood shooting. I am reposting it here so hopefully more people will read it. He’s not sure whether the mosque he is referring to is the Rabat mosque in San Diego, where Anwar Aulaqi preached in the 1990s:

I am haunted by an encounter I had in 1996 with a man who attended that San Diego mosque. I was working at a military inpatient psychiatric hospital and the man was a patient of ours. He was with us long term because he was awaiting discharge from the military. There was not much notable about the patient until he started getting passes that allowed him to leave the hospital on weekends and certain evenings during the week. He did not have an Arabic name nor was he Arab, but at some point he began attending the mosque. Almost immediately there was a drastic change in he personality. He was constantly angry and confrontational. Our patients were not allowed in their rooms during the day (for their own safety.) We kept finding him in his room praying and kept having to re-direct him out onto the day area to do his prayers. (I couldn’t care less that he was praying, but we had to enforce the rules on everyone irregardless. This was a locked down, very acute care inpatient psychiatric unit that received patients via MEDI-VAC from all over the world) One day I had to go coax him out of the room again cause he had sneaked in there to pray. He instantly became confrontational, but it then took an unexpected turn. He began confronting me about being a Christian. (I didn’t tell him anything about my religious beliefs. He just assumed I was Christian.) Then he began yelling at me that one day I’ll have to stand in front of Allah for judgment and that he will be standing there with me laughing at me. He said something about Jesus being a fool and carried on about how he hates Christian’s & Jew’s and they will all burn in hell. I finally cut him off while laughing at him and I told him to get out of his room now I’ll he was going to have to spend some time in our isolation room. He stopped yelling and walked out into the day room to continue his prayers. I acted as though I had laughed it off, but truthfully it shook me up inside. I was not intimidated by him physically. I towered over this little man. I’m 6’4″ and weighed 250 pounds at the time. I had never seen anyone truly look at me with such hatred that there was murder in his eyes. I know if he had a weapon in his hand at the time, he would have used it. Knowing now what kind of people were coming and going from that mosque, my haunted, shook up feeling I experienced was justified.

Who is Jim McCarthy of CounterPoint Strategies?

????????ikoniIf you’ve found your way to this page, there’s a good chance that you’re a journalist who has just had the pleasure of meeting an unusually aggressive PR flak named Jim McCarthy.

Don’t let me scare you

First off, relax. If anything, the fact that you’ve run into Jim may be a good thing. This guy has represented some major league Wall Street crooks, so there’s a chance that you’re on to something.

CounterPoint’s current and former clients include:

  • Elliott Broidy, a wealthy California investor who pleaded guilty to paying $1 million in bribes to influence former New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi.
  • Ira Rennert’s Renco Group and its Doe Run subsidiary St. Louis, the largest lead producer in the Western hemisphere. Jim does not want you to watch this video about the company’s operations in Peru.
  • The Formaldehyde Council
  • The National Fisheries Institute (Think mercury)
  • Bond insurer MBIA.
  • The College Sports Council
  • Hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam, who was convicted of securities fraud. (Update: Raj Rajaratnam was sentenced to 11 years in prison.)
  • Dallas-based Kosmos Energy, majority-owned by private-equity firms Blackstone Group and Warburg Pincus.

I had the pleasure of dealing with Mr. McCarthy a few times when I was investigating one of those crooks, a guy named Elliot Broidy, so I decided to put together this handy-dandy guide for the perplexed:

Jim is president of CounterPoint Strategies, a public relations firm in Washington, D.C. that specializes in an aggressive, combative style of crisis management. Jim is the real-life version of the fictional tobacco flak in Christopher Buckley’s novel Thank You For Smoking. His job is to make your story about you.

He’s the son of liberal journalist and peace activist Colman McCarthy. The acorn fell pretty far from the tree in this case, although the dynamics of that relationship must be pretty interesting. Young Jim registered as a Republican at age 18.

Early in his PR career, Jim handled a variety of Fortune 500 and foreign government accounts for two public relations agencies in Washington, Ruder-Finn and Nichols-Dezenhall, the “brass-knuckled boys” of DC’s PR world.

Ready to pounce

In 1994, McCarthy started a boutique public relations agency, McCarthy Communications. McCarthy Communications reportedly billed one client, the Saginaw Chippewa Indian tribe of central Michigan, $280,000 for a media campaign designed to force out the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Replying to a BIA spokesman who said he had never seen such tactics, McCarthy said, “I say to Mr. Hackler, welcome to the Beltway.”

A confidential McCarthy Communications proposal was obtained by The Washington Post. (See William Claiborne, “Tribe PR Drive Targeted BIA Head”, The Washington Post, Aug. 16, 1999)

McCarthy was hired by the Augusta National Golf Club in 2002 when the men-only club was under pressure by activist [[Martha Burk]] to admit women. McCarthy advised a “pugnacious” approach. “My clients appreciate that I like to get in the arena, take off the gloves and throw down,” McCarthy told Alan Shipnuck, who wrote a book about Augusta’s battle to keep women out. (See Taking on the Times”, Sports Illustrated, April 6, 2004.)

It’s the first time I’ve done this kind of media criticism as part of an overall strategy for a client, and I don’t know of any other PR firm that has done it. It’s pretty cutting-edge. Big PR firms are like large corporations in that they have always been afraid to take on the press directly, because there is this belief if you create an adversarial relationship, you will never be treated fairly again. But for a venerable institution like Augusta National to embrace that strategy, well, that has certainly opened some eyes. Now I’m trying to build media-crit-driven crisis management into stand-alone business. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be snapped up by a big, deep-pocketed PR firm.

In 2004, McCarthy co-founded Public Interest Watch, a Washington nonprofit heavily funded by Exxon Mobil. According to BusinessWeek, McCarthy’s ex-employer, renamed Dezenhall Resources, helped create PIW in 2002 specifically to prod the IRS to go after Greenpeace.

David “Nick” Nichols

Just as McCarthy had hoped, deep pockets did find him. McCarthy Communications was hired in 2004 to represent investor Kenneth Langone, who was named in a lawsuit by then-New York State Attorney General Elliot Spitzer. On Langone’s behalf, McCarthy has repeatedly attacked the credibility of Gretchen Morgenson, a Pulitzer Prize winning business journalist for The New York Times, saying businesspeople regarded her with “pure contempt.” Apparently, Langone didn’t like it that Morgenson pointed out how Langone was a poster boy for executive overcompensation.

In 2008, McCarthy co-founded CounterPoint Strategies. McCarthy is the oversized face of CounterPoint, but behind the scenes is CounterPoint’s chairman, David “Nick” Nichols, a former investigative journalist who went on to found Nichols-Dezenhall, McCarthy’s old stomping grounds.

Before forming Nichols-Dezenhall, Nichols served as a campaign press secretary for New York City Mayor John Lindsay and then headed to Wisconsin where he served as a legislative staffer. Nichols also served for several as a senior media spokesperson for the Cuban-Haitian Task Force, which was charged with dealing with the thousands of refugees from Castro’s Cuba in the Mariel boat lift.

Share your McCarthy horror stories below:

 

 

Fabiani Watch: Trust Me I'm a Lawyer

икониLove this sentence in today’s Union-Tribune story on AEG saying the days of publicly-financed sports stadiums are at an end:

From his office in San Diego, Chargers special counsel Mark Fabiani said he doesn’t share that view.

For seven years starting in 2002, Fabiani said the Chargers would construct a new stadium without taxpayer support. Then for the past 16 months, he has maintained the opposite — that one couldn’t be built in downtown San Diego without a public subsidy.