Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Idea of Conspiracy Has Taken Control
The Imam’s Army drama is one of the stranger things I’ve ever witnessed in a lifetime of witnessing strange things. Remember I mentioned the site that claims to have Ahmet Şık’s book and to be counting down to releasing it on the Internet? Reported today in Hürriyet:
The website’s manager appears to be “cemaat” and the address in the site’s “Information” section is that of Fethullah Gülen’s real address in Pennsylvania. The person who purchased; the URL apparently lives in Washington.
Oh, oh, oh. So many questions. First–what the hell? You get it what a cemaat is, right? There’s no translation with all the emotive overtones in English. The literal translation is “religious organization,” but in this context it should be translated as “a member of Fethullah Gülen’s multi-tentacled conspiracy to bring the entire solar system under his control.” Now remember, Şık’s book–allegedly–contains evidence that Gülen has taken control of the police, and when the police carted him off, Şık was shouting, “Anyone who touches Gülen burns!” So the intimation that this website is actually a Gülenist front is–how can I put this?–look, whoever’s handling this book’s publicity, can we be in touch? I want you on Team Berlinski.
This was reported, by the way, in what is basically an opposition paper, especially since it’s facing extinction-by-taxation. And this gets weirder–oh yes, it can, and oh yes it does. As our member Okan reasonably asked me, “How could they see what is private under domainsbyproxy? Did they hack it?” And when you look–well, do you see a cemaat address, or a Pennsylvania one?
So what could possibly be going on here? Can anyone tell me, technically, whether we’re missing something?
I’m not even going to ask whether anyone can guess just what kind of conspiracy we’re dealing with. We can’t. It’s beyond the ken of the Occidental mind. It’s beyond the ken of the Turkish mind, too, which is the most interesting part. No one knows what’s going on, no one can provide evidence of anything, no account of this makes sense, no one has a straight story, no one seems to know which side he’s on; the government can’t even keep up any kind of straight line about it. The conspiracy has now wrapped itself around its own tail so many times that no one could be in control of it, even in theory. There’s a vaporous black ether of conspiracy everywhere you look, to be sure, and it seems to be more powerful, this ether, than anything of human agency could ever be.
Amazingly, the idea of conspiracy is now running this country.
Published in General
Hiding behind a domainbyproxy type arrangement is intended to foil the gross harvesters of data like Google or some of the automated spiders that “browse” the web looking for particular flavors of information and sucking them out for exploit. Anyone representing themselves as having legitimate business with the owners may be able to obtain contact information. Certainly police would have little trouble.
Anyone who sets up a site like this would presumably be aware of that, right? And would therefore be trying to advance the suspicion that this site is controlled either by Gülen or by Washington … and tipping off the opposition media … and … why? I mean, if you simply wanted to drive Turkey over the brink, if this were the wildest psy-op ever, you couldn’t do better than to throw in a maddening touch like that.
The thick plotens:
Here’s the dead home page of http://www.imaminordusu.com/
And, weirdly enough, that appears to be hosted at GoDaddy. Yeah, that’s a head-scratcher.
The “website manager” does not necessarily mean the registrant, admin, or technical contacts from the whois query, but could a reference to the domain at the mailto: link on the site’s home page, like “contact us” or something.
Oh, man … we need a UFO to top this off.
You know how iffy those PHP sites are.
And Claire, you set this up that way as a double blind so that you know who is taking an interest in you. The contact behind the proxy is probably just another front, and I would bet the contact is in a country without an extradition arrangement with Turkey. The Web let’s you go nuts with this stuff.
The registry wants the owner of the domain name and the technical contact for the domain name. Beyond that, titles are whatever the guy who set up the registry entry slapped on.
Also, there is no reason to assume that a given Internet host is down well. Anywhere a signal can go, the Internet can go. An FTL hyperwave link the size of a baseball in geosynchronous orbit can link up with Victor Davis Hanson’s broadband Internet dish at the farm and allow Zaphod to reestablish the Caliphate over grilled lamb and marinated dates. I think the towels are in the third drawer down, under the box of fish. From one end of the galaxy to the other, packets are packets.