Al-Qaeda Web Sites Go Offline 284
thefickler writes "Four out of the five Al-Qaeda online forums have disappeared. The terrorist group used these forums to relay messages to its supporters. The four that have gone missing seem to have taken a hit back on September 10, the day before the annual video marking the 9/11 attacks was due to be disseminated. No one knows who is responsible for the sites' disappearance."
good. (Score:4, Funny)
but you know it means they're doing something else now.
I suspect it's how Sarah Palin jokes are strung together that is the new medium. they're ubiquitous and cannot be stopped by any force known to mankind.
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Huh? Is that some kind of joke whose punchline went over my head?
If you'd said that Sarah Palin, with her rambling incoherence, is the Dan Quayle 2.0, I'd understand you. But Joe Biden? What exactly does he have in common with Quayle?
We're talking about the same Dan Quayle right? The one who is the sole reason that George W. Bush isn't the dumbest politician America has ever seen?
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Yes, that sounds pretty stupid.
But he has a LONG way to go from a couple of gaffes to the years of systematic idiocy that was Dan Quayle. I am pretty sure that there are entire yearly joke calendars filled with dumb things that Quayle said while he was V.P. (I'm pretty sure such things exist for GWB as well). I doubt you could fill a week with the dumb Biden comments thus far. I watched a brief bit of the VP "debate" and Biden looked smarter to me than Palin did. So aside from some gaffes I don't see hi
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Are you serious? I remember clearly the entire 4 years of Quayle's vice presidency. He was dumb as dirt. My particular favorite was the one where he went on and on and blathered completely unintelligable bullshit about Hawaii.
Here I found a nice little montage on YouTube for you to enjoy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIFggCQv4J4 [youtube.com]
Now THAT is one stupid motherfucker. ALthough, for many of those gaffes, he appears to be high or drunk or something. Maybe he was a genius with a drug habit?
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I think you didn't RTFA carefully enough. It says it's talking about private, password-protected sites. So even if they did provide links, all you could "verify" is either that they have indeed linked to a site that doesn't exist (and how would you be able to tell whether it really had been an al-Qaeda site before?), or to some kind of login page (and, without a password, how would you be able to tell whether it was really an al-Qaeda site or just a random anonymous login page?)
This is nothing to do with
Yeah... so what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yeah... so what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah... so what? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah... so what? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah... so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
The government budget to run these sites has been transferred to bailing out the banks.
This is probably the smartest commend I've read here!
Al-Qaeda was a CIA DB name for the mujahedin back in the 80's.
They are 100% CIA asset, commanded and funded by the CIA.
Now lets joke on the truth:
So either they removed the funds, or Al-Qaeda ppl are too busy growing heroin for the NYSE bubble.
Americans be aware: You are a great nation, awesome people, and your government is making you look really REALLY bad. When the BIG shit hits the fan "they" will bail out, and you will take the heat! Don't you feel your freedom fading away? The world will hate you.
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which is more useful ? (Score:3, Insightful)
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You are probably right about the terrorists having a more secure means of communication. So really this does nothing to stop the terrorists.
BUT, it may hurt thier propaganda machine a bit. I don't know how popular these sites where, or what the content was like. But if shutting them down means that a few more people don't sign up then it is probably not a bad thing.
Of course they are now missing out on the ability to track IPs that visit those sites, assuming that they were doing that before they shut them
That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, really. Apparently.
In one of the most transparently stupid "LOOK! TERRORISTS!" stories to date, The Times has "exclusively" published a report claiming terrorists are hiding their secret terrorist messages inside child pornography [timesonline.co.uk]. Because, y'know, obviously you're going to hide your messages somewhere already illegal rather than in wedding photos or LOLcats.
I'm pleased to say that the commenters on the article - and UK newspaper online comments are one of the purest sources of raw stupid on the planet - are already condemning this as obvious Home Office press-release ware.
The Times has been spotted running press releases for the Home Office before [blogspot.com] with jawdroppingly stupid scare stories. Coincidentally, the Home Office's call for the police to be able to hold people 42 days without charge just got rejected. Obviously not linked.
I wrote a blog post [today.com] on it, but I'm not sure it's obviously a parody of a stupid thing that someone actually tried to seriously push.
Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and there's a firehose story [slashdot.org] on the subject which could do with clicking up. Blithering stupidity is best dealt with by wide exposure.
Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Blithering stupidity is best dealt with by wide exposure.
Turns out that that is not the case [washingtonpost.com].
Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, really. Apparently.
In one of the most transparently stupid "LOOK! TERRORISTS!" stories to date, The Times has "exclusively" published a report claiming terrorists are hiding their secret terrorist messages inside child pornography [timesonline.co.uk].
OH MY GOD! Those long nights where I stared intently, deeply into into the Goatse image. I knew there was something else there. IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!
Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:5, Insightful)
I read that terrorists, and by terrorists I'm going to go with Radical Islamic Fundamentalists since the
Utterly stupid since law enforcement already targets this channel, there is no 'free speech' when it involves child porn, and there's news all the time about how these rings get busted, suppliers and consumers alike.
Utterly brilliant because it is a known channel that has a clientele that takes lots of precautions, they try their best not to get noticed. With the ubiquity of unsecured wireless spots they could effectively get into these rings and do their thing with a high level of anonymity and have the provider of the hot spot be the main target of any fuzz scrutiny. This would also be incredibly disheartening to the investigators, whereas they used to just have to send the messages to decoders and translators, now that message is in a despicable photo or video that someone will have to watch, tell me that isn't going to leave a few scars.
Then again it could be a cash grab by the agencies that investigate child porn, nothing wrong with more money to fight that evil.
Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:4, Insightful)
The police are all over that. What this is is a push by the Home Office to take more civil rights away.
Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, ofcourse. It's obviously so much easier to get all your fellow terrorists into a closed child-porn ring in order to exchange messages via steganography than to just install FireGPG and use any friggin' public message board, usenet or, *gasp*, e-mail.
Seriously, how brain damaged do you have to be to buy into such bullshit?
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Seriously, how brain damaged do you have to be to buy into such bullshit?
The current typical American pre-programmed brain will do just fine and that's exactly who this stuff is aimed at.
Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:5, Funny)
This would also be incredibly disheartening to the investigators, whereas they used to just have to send the messages to decoders and translators, now that message is in a despicable photo or video that someone will have to watch, tell me that isn't going to leave a few scars.
So the terrorists should use the goatse guy for hiding their messages. He seems spacious enough.
Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:5, Funny)
So the terrorists should use the goatse guy for hiding their messages. He seems spacious enough.
As an added bonus, their fellow terrorists will lose the will to live after staring at the goatse guy long enough to decode the message, making them perfect recruits for suicide bombings.
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Seriously, if I were him, I wouldn't want to be associated with terrorists. I'd want to clear my name of such despicable behavior.
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I read that terrorists, and by terrorists I'm going to go with Radical Islamic Fundamentalists since the /. article is about Al-Qaeda, are using child porn to hide their coded messages. I can't shake that this is both utterly stupid and utterly brilliant at the same time.
I agree, it is brilliant. I mean, think of it, if they bust these guys, they'd have to arrest themselves!!
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It gets worse, cops aren't usually bright. They look for the evidence of a crime and evidence of who commited them. How many messages were transmitted and actually caught before someone wondered why some Photo's were larger file sizes then other of that something in the back ground was off and could have been used to send a code? I mean when the cops bust a kiddie porn ring, they are more worried about the kiddie porn then anything else.
I'm also betting that Al Qeada would have just doctored existing kiddie
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The point is that child pornographers might well have secret messages to exchange between themselves. And that's just on top of any old police procedure these days that just leads any digital image through steganography detection automatically.
IF, and that's a big if, this were actually true, it'd never be accidentally leaked. That's not how intelligence agencies work. My guess is that some child pornographers were trying out their signal reception by hiding fake messages. That or some AQ operative was
Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:5, Insightful)
But isn't child porn on their list of immoral acts?
Yes. It fails the critical thinking test entirely. Islamic fundamentalists don't even like regular adult nudity -- possession of child pornography would likely get you executed in Islamist countries.
It's like saying that Islamic Terrorists are hiding their hidden messages in pictures of Allah.
Governments pray on public stupidity.
Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:5, Funny)
Why not just hide their message in slashdot troll posts? Not like anyone reads them anyways...unless you know what you're looking for...
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Why not just hide their message in slashdot troll posts? Not like anyone reads them anyways...unless you know what you're looking for...
Maybe that's the real reason behind all those twitter conversations.
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Shut up, Abdul.
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Re:That's cos they use child porn now. Ya rly. (Score:5, Funny)
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No way. Everyone knows the terrorists are really hiding their secret messages in music and movies on BitTorrent sites and in easter eggs contained in cracked software. And the source code for the Linux kernel is also one big long top secret terrorist messages. And if you listen carefully to what Steve Jobs has to say, every third word is accented in a funny way so as to convey a hidden terrorist message.
Obviously (Score:2, Funny)
The sites were no longer needed -- they decided that Facebook was finally good enough for their purposes. Here's A BIG BEAR HUGG!! RAWRRR!
The trouble begins... (Score:4, Insightful)
...when the drums stop.
rj
Re:The trouble begins... (Score:5, Funny)
"Why? What happens then?"
"Bass solo!"
Take down notice (Score:5, Funny)
Hrm... (Score:5, Funny)
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Stupid to shut them down. Censorship = wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
Everything goes underground then.
From the article... (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently he's not an expert on American communications - who get any information from the three sites he called out?
Re:From the article... (Score:4, Funny)
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whitehouse.gov has endless press releases. If you're deep enough into politics that you don't want or need pundits, that's where you find most of your info on what's going on. That's where your senators and representatives are supposed to get much of their information.
Not specifically sure about pentagon.mil, but plenty of useful info is provided on .mil sites... Mil-spec information can be quite useful. The rainbow books have been available as
US gov is installing root kits on them as well spy (Score:2)
US gov is installing root kits on them spyware also.
Oh my Gawd... (Score:3, Funny)
whoever shut these guys down (Score:4, Insightful)
we don't want them shut down
let them communicate openly. then track the fuckers. now their communication is more hidden, and thus our knowledge of what's going on
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Posting this from an eeePC by the way. It is very portable, and easy to keep secure. I wonder if openbsd runs on it?
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That or the guy who runs them and pays their hosting bills got killed somehow. I mean they do cost money and it isn't like someone can put something on the interweb without a front somewhere. You need an IP, a domain, a connection and so on.
It could also be that the hacked servers hosting them went down and they were rebuilt from scratch, this time without the terrorist BS.
al qaeda doesn't call it a day (Score:3, Interesting)
you don't understand what motivates them
religious bigotry is bottomless pit of slime which constantly renews
all you need is arrogance and a feeling of superiority
and then "god" gives you the right to kill subhumans
subhumans are anyone who doesn't believe as you do
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While I don't argue with your analysis, it -is- notable that, despite the US president being possible the most antagonistic target that Bin Laden and co could hope for, the rate of terrorist acts and (as far as we can tell) discovered but interrupted plots has declined significantly around the world. One has to wonder what that means. It may mean that the supply of cannon fodder is running low.
i guess you don't live in a muslim country (Score:2)
the #1 victim of murderous islamic fundamentalists is, always was, and always will be, other muslims
other muslims who don't tow the ultrastrict line. a moderate muslim is worse than an infidel, as they should know better. and so they are job number one for murder. this is why the middle east can't modernize, can't moderate its thought. anyone who tries to do so, its instant open season for assassination
the west only seems to notice or care when these fundamentalist muslim assholes victimize the west. so the
So what are the URLs? (Score:5, Informative)
The classic site was Voice of Jihad [sawtaljihad.com], but that's been more or less dead for a while. Back in August, it was apparently taken over by some McCain supporter. Now it's a misconfigured shared-IP site on Dreamhost.
bin Laden's annual video didn't get much press this year. He's released his 2008 video, and it's 87 minutes long, but it's hard to find. Reuters has a summary. [reuters.com].
I suspect that the main reason there's pressure to suppress his videos is that he always has something tellingly negative to say about Bush. This year, bin Laden's sound bite is "And in fact, the subject of the Mujahideen has become an inseparable part of the speech of your leader and the effects and signs are not hidden."
It's worth remembering that the bin Laden family supported Bush's first presidential campaign. [denverpost.com] In 1978, Bush and Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, founded Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas. Sometimes one wonders if the plan was to get an incompetent into the US presidency, then apply enough pressure to make him overreact. A pre 9-11 bio of bin Laden, "The Man who Declared War on America", has quotes from him indicating that he felt America needed to be corrupted before it could be taken down, and outlined what needed to be done to make that happen. All the family had to do was to get someone in office who thought tax cuts would fix anything, get him to overspend on the wrong war, and wait for the US economy to collapse.
We may yet see a "Mission Accomplished" from bin Laden.
Re:So what are the URLs? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, I suspect the reason his videos aren't reported as much is that whenever Bin Laden shows his face, it energizes Americans and makes them more likely to vote Republican. The media is ridiculously pro-Obama this year and does not want a repeat of 2004 when Bin Laden released a video and threatened Americans a week before the election. We're in a media environment in which the New York Times will run an editorial by Obama but refuse to run one by McCain. Comedians mock Sarah Palin's apparent stupidity while ignoring that Joe Biden said Americans were huddled around television sets to see President Roosevelt [politico.com]. Palin is criticized for her religious views, yet Obama is a Christian who went to the church of reverend Wright for 20 years, and Joe Biden is a Catholic (amazingly, McCain is the least religious candidate).
So I wouldn't worry about any Bin Laden videos popping up to energize conservative voters this time.
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Wow. Your second to last sentence is appalling.
Saying
Palin is criticized for her religious views, yet Obama is a Christian who went to the church of reverend Wright for 20 years, and Joe Biden is a Catholic (amazingly, McCain is the least religious candidate).
Amounts to saying
and Joe Biden is a Jew!
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Actually if Biden was a Jew, that would be a plus to many Americans. We have only elected one Catholic as President in the history of the US and that was Kennedy.
It has something to do with being obligated to the vatican and the pope and so one. But more recently, it is competition for Michal Jackson's line, what warm and brown and in a little boys pants, a catholic priests hand.
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I'm aware Kennedy has been the only Catholic president, but there have been NO presidents of a faith other than Christianity.
As far as being "controlled by the pope", AFAIK and can find by searching online, Kennedy never visited the pope during his presidency, as George W. Bush has.
But that wasn't really my point, my point was that OPs statement was blatantly bigoted and akin to racism.
Yes, but no (Score:3, Insightful)
Washington did not claim to be a Christian (Score:3, Insightful)
In concluding the interview, Dr. Wilson said "I have diligently perused every line that Washington ever gave to the public, and I do not find one expression in which he pledges him self as a believ
Re:So what are the URLs? (Score:5, Insightful)
So someone like you who is holding on to a position that a lot of people are moving away from will think the shift in media attention is directed from the top down, instead of from the bottom up, that the media is changing things instead of reporting on changing opinions.
You are suffering from what I like to call the "Fringe Media Censorship Bias," which is where people with marginal or fringe beliefs often attribute their beliefs lack of representation in the "media" to some sort of censorship, rather then a lack of interest from the rest of society. Some, like Noam Chomsky, suffer from this condition to the extent where they write whole books trying to rationalize that it's the "media" ignoring them and not just society in general.
Osama probably didn't get the air time because he's old hat. Your example is from what? 4 years ago? Christ thats a generation in media years. And Palin is dumb, and that's a story that sells.
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always tickled when people speak as if the media is actually a cohesive entity that can do anything in a unified way. It makes it sound somehow more sinister and ex
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It's also worth noting that the bin Laden family disowned Osama many years ago. I'm not an apologist for the middle east. In fact, I don't see much of a downside in turning it into a big glass parking lot. But let's put all the facts out there when discussing things.
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I find it rather terrifying that enough people who happened to have mod points decided to bring this up to +5 Insightful. I'm sorry, this bullshit is unacceptable (though he's right about the bin Laden family).
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and nothing of value was lost
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I suspect that the main reason there's pressure to suppress his videos is that he always has something tellingly negative to say about Bush. This year, bin Laden's sound bite is "And in fact, the subject of the Mujahideen has become an inseparable part of the speech of your leader and the effects and signs are not hidden."
It boggles me how messed up some people are. You have determined in the absence of any evidence (aside from a pathetic soundbite) that these videos are being suppressed because they somehow embarass Bush. Not because these videos are ways to communicate to Al Qaeda cells. And the press is complicit in this because what? People really want to listen to an 87 minute rant from one of the more reprehensible men on the planet? I'm sure it makes sense to you.
It's worth remembering that the bin Laden family supported Bush's first presidential campaign. In 1978, Bush and Osama bin Laden's brother, Salem bin Laden, founded Arbusto Energy, an oil company based in Texas. Sometimes one wonders if the plan was to get an incompetent into the US presidency, then apply enough pressure to make him overreact. A pre 9-11 bio of bin Laden, "The Man who Declared War on America", has quotes from him indicating that he felt America needed to be corrupted before it could be taken down, and outlined what needed to be done to make that happen. All the family had to do was to get someone in office who thought tax cuts would fix anything, get him to overspend on the wrong war, and wait for the US economy to collapse.
I'm sure you wonder all sorts of crazy stuff. But if th
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Reference on the family disowning him please? I recall something about suspicions that he was still receiving money from them... but have no references for that either.
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And that there are a cubic buttload of bin-Ladens. Its an enormous family.
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You were marked troll for your foul language. Try harder next time bitch.
compromised channels? (Score:2)
Sheesh, I mean if the journalists know about them, I know I'd try to use something else...
Let alone waiting for the journalists to write public articles about it...
Restored by election time? (Score:3, Insightful)
If these sites are down, how will Al-Qaeda make its pre-election rant against the Republican candidate like they did four years ago? If they once again want the Republicans to win (more likely in their view to create the clash of civilizations that they're dreaming of) how will they pull that off this time?
We know that Hamas has endorsed Obama. Maybe bin Laden will do the same just to make sure that McCain is elected and the US can more easily be painted as the Great Satan.
hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
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Not likely. Terrorists don't strike me as being good lolcows.
You know what this means, don't you? (Score:2, Funny)
Oh no! (Score:2)
Sites (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anybody know where to *find* these sites? Even Wikipedia won't supply links.
Al-Qaeda offline because... (Score:2)
The Bush administration forgot to renew their domain names... tee-hee!
Anonymous forums (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:fp (Score:5, Funny)
Re:fp (Score:5, Informative)
I think I speak for all of us when I say: Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
No, you are just speaking for people with really high UIDs.
That post was a cut-n-paste of a tired, old troll posting with the slight up date of using Obama instead of some random jock twink type.
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I don't consider my UID to be "really high". I still go Whiskey Tango Foxtrot when I see those trolls, even though I recognize them.
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Yeah, does anyone know the actual origin of that story? It sounds to me like something that was originally written seriously - that it really was the author's fantasy.
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Ha. That's one of the funniest things I've heard all day. (no sarcasm)
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It's very scary to see people like you get brainwashed this way.
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Re:Athiest, Atypical (Score:5, Informative)
Though apparently this isn't the point of the discussion at hand.
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I should add that 'th' in 'theist' should actually be a 'd' sound as in 'deist'. The reason for why we have the-ology and the-ist is due to a Greek confusion between theta and delta and the position of the tongue as you say either sound.
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figures that psycho-anal-ytic the-rapists insist you lay yourself down on that couch
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they don't seem to take to kindly to that.
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While we're picking at nits, though, "Editors", or even "real Editors," doesn't require capitalization--only to their staff are they God-like, and perhaps even then only if the editor is Harold Ross. The Post, on the other hand, probably deserves
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I like the idea behind your analysis, however you are incorrect.
The disappearance (of the sites) = The sites' disappearance.
In this case disappearance is a noun (more specifically a direct object), therefore it can use the possessive form (with 's) as well.
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Wow, it's LIKE an article. It's just missing any news. "No one knows" -- Uh, yeah someone knows. The Washington post doesn't know.
Ergo "The Washington Post" == "No one"
Er, your criticism may be valid, but your grammar is way off. Consider the following:
"No one knows X" AND "The Washington Post doesn't know X"
If you didn't fail grammar school level logic lessons, then it follows "The Washington Post is not 'no one'", since if it were 'no one', it would've known "X".
I am very tempted to introduce a certain pot to a kettle.
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Allah and God are the same entity. But batman and the Easter bunny are separate. But your comment was along the lines of Bob Dole did it along with the help of Bob Dole and some other people.
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