December 30, 2001

9:13 AM

The Tora-Bora ManuscriptsAs soon as I published this journal at Blogger.com its servers were hacked. I believe it is a conspiracy perpetrated by the enemies of the TRUTH, trying to stop me. A lame but amusing hoax? Or dangerous and ancient secrets that will blow things wide open?
posted by y6y6y6 (16 comments total)

. A lame but amusing hoax? Or dangerous and ancient secrets that will blow things wide open?

And what's the difference?
posted by y2karl at 9:26 AM on December 30, 2001

Obviously true. That book clearly has a curse on it, and any one who touches it, or even mentions it, comes to harm. You were forced by the curse of the book to double post.

Damn. Now I've gotten myself into the loop, and the}re}}'s no7~~~ w*&h }}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}

NO CARRIER
posted by Slithy_Tove at 9:29 AM on December 30, 2001

He's also defending his veracity here.
posted by y6y6y6 at 9:35 AM on December 30, 2001

Yea, right!

Actually I think the writer is David Belfield aka Hassan Tantai, the American assassin who offed Ali Akbar Tabatabai (former Iranian diplomat) in 1980. Hassan is starring in the new Iranian hit movie Kandahar and is a wanted man in the US.
posted by marc-hamilton at 9:43 AM on December 30, 2001

just fyi... the orginal site still exists at blogspot. The truth supressors didn't manage to tear it down, I guess.
posted by pattiann at 9:49 AM on December 30, 2001

This is one of those rare occasions when I'd like to know where the poster first encountered the link. Right now, it looks like some weblogger's just screwing around.
posted by xiffix at 10:09 AM on December 30, 2001

A journalist who doesn't want to publish a huge scoop because it will ruin their reputation...
posted by andrew cooke at 10:45 AM on December 30, 2001

For a backward Afghan journalist he's got a good eye for aesthetics and he's pretty handy in HTML. Plus he's decided to put his site up at Port5 and Blogspot, not Geocities.af ...
posted by skylar at 10:54 AM on December 30, 2001

As the old joke goes, "My wife yelled at me and made me stop watching the X Files. They must have gotten to her".
posted by MidasMulligan at 11:05 AM on December 30, 2001

If you look towards the bottom of the page, he also took the time to join some webrings. If his information is so world-changing, hits would be the last thing I'd think he'd be worried about.
posted by digital_insomnia at 1:10 PM on December 30, 2001

He lived in Joplin, MO in 1972, when McGovern was shot? He wasn't reading the papers very well.

My vote is that this barely reaches shaggy-dog story level. For a journalist, he sure has a way of burying his lead. Three pages in and I haven't a clue what the big secret is.
posted by dhartung at 2:39 PM on December 30, 2001

What don't the ancients know?! Its sad that the illuminati had to take down blogger just to keep this little secret from getting out. How they let Nostradamus get through the cracks is beyond me.
posted by skallas at 3:34 PM on December 30, 2001

This is Better.
posted by Niahmas at 6:25 PM on December 30, 2001

For a backward Afghan journalist he's got a good eye for aesthetics and he's pretty handy in HTML. Plus he's decided to put his site up at Port5 and Blogspot, not Geocities.af ...

Well I'm not sure he has. Look here.
posted by Stomne at 7:02 PM on December 30, 2001

What? Sara's using bloggertemplate59 same as our mystery journalist. It's just a canned template available to all and sundry...
posted by xiffix at 8:29 PM on December 30, 2001

I guess no-one will ever read this, but I felt there should be a comment here - I (and I guess others posting here) got an email from Ali Kilabah explaining that this is indeed fiction. If you go here and scoll down a bit you'll see

[...]

The truth is I am a writer, besides other things, (it is true I am not American), and Ali Kilabah is a personage and also my alias for this story. The Tora Bora manuscripts is an ongoing story that mixes real facts from the news (you might recognize the photographers arrested by the tribesman, the manifestation in Islamabad, etc.), some really ancient information I want to pass on (a kind of excerpt of the information from a book I translated from English ten years ago), and a fiction personage (Ali Kilabah) to wrap it up in one story.

I had just published it on Blogger when it got hacked, so I decided, just for fun, to write that introduction and leave the idea the hacker was trying to stop Tora-Bora's manuscripts of being published. You know how blogs are, the great majority of them are usually forgotten corner on the web, read only by those who write them and their mothers. I thought mine would be so, except that my mother does not use the Internet.

But things were not so, and this is the wonder of the Web. Besides you, some other people found it and between Dec 31st and Jan 1st, almost one thousand unique visitors had came in, consuming 63 Mb of the 100 Mb Port5.com would allow me to use. So I moved it back to Blogger.com in a new address torabora.blogspot.com (I am still unable to log in the original tora-bora.blogspot.com after the hacking, because my password does not work).

[...]

As he said in the email: "a home-made personal fantasy spread more than I'd expected"...
posted by andrew cooke at 2:40 PM on January 5, 2002