Frequent Daily Kos Poster Cites Neo-Nazi Hate Site Run by FBI Informant?

Okay, I'm just getting my arms around this story, so there may be some changes along the way, but it's just such a deliciously nutty tale that I can't resist running with it as is.

First, we have mentioned David Lindorff a few times. Lindorff's a regular poster on DailyKos. His bio over there reads:

Journalist Dave Lindorff writes for Counterpunch, the Nation, and Salon. He has written four books. The most recent, co-authored with Barbara Olshansky is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press).

He's also a 9-11 nutbar, which is why we have covered him. Lindorff has gotten away with posting "Truther" diaries at DailyKos, despite the standing ban on those diaries from Markos himself.

Back in July, CounterPunch published a hyperventilating article from Lindorff, entitled "Martial Law Threat is Real". He also posted it as a Diary at DailyKos.

Put this together with the wholly secret construction now under way--courtesy of a $385-million grant by the US Army Corps of Engineers to Halliburton subsidiary KBR Inc--of detention camps reportedly capable of confining as many as 400,000 people, and a recent report that the Pentagon has a document, dated June 1, 2007, classified Top Secret, which declares there to be a developing "insurgency" within the U.S, and which lays out a whole martial law counterinsurgency campaign against legal dissent, and you have all the ingredients for a military takeover of the United States.

These, of course, are the infamous "FEMA Death Camps" of Alex Jones' fevered fantasies. Paranoid Left, meet the Paranoid Right.

Give the commenter Moody Loner at Kos credit; he asked for a citation for the part I bolded above. Lindorff replies here:

It was provided to a radio host in Bergen, NJ. He's got it.

It reads like it's real, and having obtained the whole plan for Rex-84, the Ollie North plan for Martial Law, myself, I can say that this is of a piece with that document, and appears actually, to build on it, which would be logical.

He provided a link to "HalTurnershow.com" which is now a defunct website. To their credit several commenters noted that Turner is a notorious Neo-Nazi kook. And, at least according to this article, an FBI informant.

He was an FBI informant, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that monitors hate groups and extremists.

According to the center, hackers confronted Turner on his Web site Jan. 1 and told him they had broken into Turner's computer server.

What they found were e-mails between Turner and an FBI agent who was apparently Turner's handler. The unidentified hackers posted a July 7 e-mail to the agent. In it, Turner gave the agent a message from someone threatening to kill Sen. Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, the center said in a story on its Web site, www.splcenter.org.

"Once again," Turner wrote to the agent, "my fierce rhetoric has served to flush out a possible crazy."

Now, of course, this still leaves some question in my mind as to where Turner really stands. Is he a Neo-Nazi, who got the squeeze put on him by the Feds? Or was he some guy playing a Neo-Nazi to gain the trust of those losers in order to funnel information to the G-Men?

Regardless, isn't it plain that the Nation, CounterPunch, Salon, and the Daily Kos are doing themselves no favors by publishing a writer who uses such poor judgment as to cite a Neo-Nazi as evidence for his paranoid claims?

Hat Tip: Emailer Michael P. Great find!

Update: Longtime friend of this blog, Damian Penny, points us to this over the top OpEd of Lindorff's where he muses on the "bright side" of global warming:

So what we see is that huge swaths of conservative America are set to face a biblical deluge in a few more presidential cycles.

Daily Kos Allows Crackpot Diary

Perhaps because it is written by David Lindorff, and perhaps because it's seen as tangential to the Blackwater story, but it's 9-11 nuttery being shoehorned in.

What makes this history of particular interest is that Alex Brown was the investment bank that handled most of the suspicious short-selling "puts" that were placed on the stocks of four companies—United Airlines, American Airlines, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and Merrill Lynch—that were pummeled by the 9-11 attacks.

As has been reported in Bloomberg Financial News Service reports and in the San Francisco Chronicle, in the several days preceding September 11, 2001, unidentified investors placed an unusual number of "puts" on the stocks of the two airlines whose planes were hijacked that day, as well as on the two investment banks, one of which occupied 22 floors of one of the World Trade Center towers and the other of which owned a building directly across the street which was significantly damaged and forced to close down.

The stocks of those four companies, following the attacks and the collapse of the Twin Towers, subsequently tanked, making the combined puts worth about $16 million.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, no one collected the $2.5 million in profits from the puts placed on United Airlines. The identities of the investors in the put orders have never been disclosed by Alex Brown.

Incredibly, there was never any serious investigation of these peculiar and suspicious investments, though they clearly suggest that someone knew something was going to happen that would make those four companies’ stocks plunge in value.

The US corporate news media has never pursued this story or in many cases even reported it, nor was it seriously investigated by the FBI or the 9-11 commission.

Yes, the US corporate news media has never pursued this story. Well, except for Bloomberg and the SF Chronicle, which is the only reason Lindorff ever heard of it. Hilariously he repeats the silliest claim:

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, no one collected the $2.5 million in profits from the puts placed on United Airlines.

I've gone over this before. The reason the SF Chronicle reported that no one had collected the profits on the United put options is because they had not expired as of the date the Chronicle wrote their story (September 29, 2001).



These were October options, which expired on the third Saturday of that month, or October 20, 2001. And remember, according to the 9-11 Commission (which did investigate the options) the investor who bought put options on United also bought shares of American Airlines a few days before the attacks. If they'd really had warning of 9-11 wouldn't they have been short AA and not long?

More disturbing than that Lindorff repeats the usual crackpot talking points on the put options is that the Daily Kos community apparently tolerated the posting; we see none of the "Troll Diary" tags on this one, even though the first tag is 9-11.

Hat Tip: Reader Michael P.